Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Is Joe Biden the Last Politician? With Franklin Foer

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Who is the Joe Biden that nobody knows? This week, Anthony talks with Franklin Foer about his bestselling book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.  Franklin shares light on the Biden administration behind closed doors, including the real relationship between the current President and Vice President, discussing whether Kamala Harris can really beat Donald Trump. He then gets moves on to the real legacy of Joe Biden, and whether history will reward him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is OpenBee. book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better.

You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Whatever people might think or like to say about President Joe Biden, there could be no doubt that he has been one of the most successful politicians of his generation. My guest today, Franklin Four, has written a brilliant book looking inside the Biden White House, considering the struggles it faced in the fight for America's future. From Biden's real relationship with Vice President Harris to his character and legacy from here. Is Joe Biden really the last politician?

Can Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump? Let's find out. I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Astroy's great podcast in the back room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout-out. So joining us now on Open Book is Frank Ford. He's a bestselling author and writer at the Atlantic. He's written an incredible book, The Last Politician, inside Joe Biden's White House and the struggle for America's future. And I have to tell you, I read the book about eight weeks ago, Frank. And my producer read the book as well. And we were both gone away about the detail, the reporting, the reveal. I learned a lot from your book, not only about Joe Biden, but about their White House. And we're both going away about the detail. And we were both going away about the detail, the reporting, the reveal. I learned a lot from your book. I learned a lot from your book, not only about Joe Biden, but about their White House. And we're and what they feel they're up against as it relates to planet Earth and what's going on here in the United States.

So I want to address as much of that as I can in the next 30 minutes. But I want to go to your background first, if you don't mind. How did you end up writing the book? And I know you're right for the end. But what do you report on there? So I'm in a very privileged position. I'm kind of something closer to an old school magazine writer where I don't have a beat per se. I get to flit about.

And so I do spend, I'm based in Washington, so I spend a lot of my time writing about politics, but I also get to write about politics in a very broad sort of way. So my last big story for, cover story for the Atlantic was about American Jews and the surge of anti-Semitism that's happened in this country. I wrote a book about soccer called How Soccer explains the world.

So with this book in particular, my editor at Penguin called me up. in August of 2020, just after Joe Biden had won, secured the Democratic nomination at his convention officially. And she said, you know, this administration's going to be walking into the middle of this pandemic. There's going to be an economic crisis. The institutions of government have been run down by the last administration. What if you tried to kind of embed within the administration or write a report, a book about the first hundred days of the Biden administration? And I thought, you know, that's, that's interesting. It's not what I've done before. I don't especially like Joe Biden as he's not a

politician I've ever connected with in any sort of meaningful way. I always thought he was a bit of a blowhard. And so I was a bit skeptical. But then the more I thought about it, I thought, okay, this is going to be a big deal. It'd be fun to try to do the best that I could to secure a front row seat at what was about to happen. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to write a book about the first 100 days. And I was also pretty sure that the first 100 days, are cliche. So that's the genesis of the project. Okay, so I have this, I mean, I read your book. I said, okay, how am I going to think about this book and see if I'm going to summarize some things for you in my mind. Tell me what I got right or wrong. Okay. So we have a 50-year classic old school politician, hence the title, the last politician. He's a backslapper. He's a good guy. People like him.

You can tell that he likes people. He prided himself in foreign policy because of his work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and prided himself on the Supreme Court because the Judiciary Committee always wanted to be president, right? He dropped out of the presidency in 1988. He tried a few more times. He was back in there in 2008. And then he meets Barack Obama. Barack Obama elevates him. He makes him vice president. But it turns out he's a very good vice president. He understands the Senate. He's coaching Barack Obama on certain things to do politically. He watches Obama's They're way closer than people think they are based on your reporting and based on some of things that I know. And then he rises to the presidency surprisingly because of the rise of Donald Trump.

He says, okay, I'm going to take a shout at the presidency. But now this is where the stuff gets very dark for me. We have some dark things going on on the planet. I didn't see them at the time that I was supporting Donald Trump. But the darkness is there's a group of people are adversaries, American adversaries that are working inside of social media. they're trying to influence our elections. They're trying to make America distrust its democracy, distrust its political leaders. And here's Joe Biden up against all of that, trying to reestablish the bona fides of what good political leaders do. What did I miss?

Okay. So I think that's a good summary of history. I think that Joe Biden is somebody, as you point out, who came in with a strong theory of how democracy could be repaired, was that he needed to show that politics could still work. And what is politics? Politics is this kind of technology that we have for mediating the fact that we live in a society where you can't always get what you want. So that means that sometimes we have to compromise. Sometimes we have to accept that we can't move the system in the way that we'd want to move the system because they're winners and losers in a political system. And so he wanted to prove that that politics was still possible, which meant that he had to prove that it was still possible to pass big pieces of legislation.

And sometimes those legislations would have to be passed in bipartisan fashion. I think among the things that you missed is that Joe Biden is somebody who's almost become part of the political furniture in Washington. He's somebody who's been around so long that he seems familiar. And only in the aftermath of the debate with Donald Trump, where his age caught up with him. And he spent weeks kind of twisting where there was all this pressure building on him to drop out of the race. What you saw was that he's a guy who's very proud, who, you know, he suffered all these humiliations in his life starting with the stutter and getting bullied for that. He's somebody who grew up at a Democratic Party where you had guys who went to Ivy League law schools ruling the roost, and he was always

self-conscious about the fact that he went to a state school. And so he's somebody who's had a chip on his shoulder. And there are two parts of Joe Biden. There is the Joe Biden who displays is enormous amounts of grace to people who is this human being who is able to empathize in ways that you don't see very often in politics. And then there's this other part of Joe Biden that is that is resentful, that is very self-conscious, that is very insecure. And those two things coexisted within the same guy. And I think a lot of those insecurities, which are not attractive when you're sitting twisting in the wind like he was for a couple weeks in summer, also drove him to do things that were confounded expectations. He aimed a lot higher than I think people thought that he would aim in his presidency. He started with a one-vote margin in the Senate. He was pushing through some of the biggest social legislation that we've seen since the 1960s. And that's something people didn't expect.

Yeah, I mean, let's see. He had a big, great record. I mean, his record stands with Lyndon Johnson for this back half of this political, you know, the last 50 to 60 years. But I, yeah, I guess what I, what I got, you know, you're right, you know, you weren't super fond of him in the beginning, but you seem very fond of him now. What, what is it about Joe Biden that the average person wouldn't know that you would like them to know? Yeah, I came to respect him the more that I observed him. And there's a joke, I learned this joke about politicians when I was, was a kid, about a guy walks into a used brain store. And he looks and he's looking at the various models of used brains and the show the salesperson takes somebody. He says, this is, this is the most expensive

one we have on sale. And it's the brain of a politician. He goes, why is this the most expensive one that you've got? And they say, well, because it's hardly ever used. And I think, you know, politicians are figures who we tend to culturally discount that we say, okay, somebody like Joe Biden seems to be telling us what we want to hear. We suspect that politicians tell us one thing in public and then turn around and do another thing in private. And so as I watched him kind of move through the Senate, deal with foreign leaders, I think I came to respect not just Joe Biden, but came to respect the skills of an old-fashioned politician even more. Because sometimes you do have to tell. You're sitting with the Turkish president Erdogan. There's a story where Biden is dealing with a

very delicate moment in the relationship. And he tells him, you know, go out there, say whatever you need to say about me and then come back into the room and let's cut a deal. Or in dealing with some of these Republicans on Capitol Hill, everybody in the Democratic Party was saying, these guys are toadies. They spent all this time refusing to denounce Donald Trump. Why would you want to deal with them? And Joe Biden's like, okay, I understand the world that they exist in. Therefore, I'm going to continue to try to woo these people and try to work with them. And we dismiss that. It's out of touch. It's not the way that the party system works now. But I think in the country didn't really reward him with this because his approval ratings always remained in the toilet,

but he was able to get things done. And I think that unto itself is an accomplishment. He was able to prove, at least in theory, that our institutions are still capable of functioning. Very well said, but up against that. You know, I'm going to use the word that the Democrats like using because I actually think it's the right word. You got some weird, weird, weird shit going on, okay? Yeah. Weird. Okay, you got an orange guy who obviously I made a mistake on, but once I had data points as a smart human being and a patriot, I said, okay, this guy's wrong for America. He's going to do very damaging things to America. I was part of this study in 2012. We had lost the election to Barack Obama. I mean, he was a sitting president and we sat down at the Republican National Committee and said,

okay, what are we going to do to bring more people, more demographics, more groups into the Republican party? We talked about opening up ideas to better immigration policies. We talked about more of an outreach, some modification of some views. And that got thrown out by the wayside. And we've got this anarcho ultra-Christian organization. They went in the opposite direction from the one that you suggested. They did. Yeah, but it was not just me, by the way. It was a committee of people. And it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember old school Republicans. And so, but the group of people, by the way, I talk to senators and you can find me on people's donors lists. Okay, I still give money to my Republican friends in the Senate. Most of them despise Trump privately. You know this. You're a good journalist. Yeah, yeah, of course. And then they say good things about in public. So what do you think that is about? And how do you think America post Joe Biden, which, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, fair and square. Joe Biden reset the table for American institutions. Joe Biden prosecuted his ideas and promulgated a legislative agenda that's second only to Lyndon Johnson. How do we address this issue going forward? What do you think happens?

I mean, I think one of the failures of the Biden presidency is that he wanted to turn us back to a normal country. There was a status quo that predated Donald Trump that he felt like if he demonstrated, institutions work that you could pass legislation that did meaningful things for people's lives, then we could all get back to normal. And the truth is, we're not a normal country anymore. The country itself has changed. And it is interesting to me to compare the two parties as institutions, because we just watched this stretch where the Democratic Party saw that there was a problem that Joe Biden was too old to govern for another four years and that he was going to be a bad candidate headed into this November's election, maybe belatedly, because they probably

should have done this a year ago, they went to him and they said, you know what? You got to step aside. And so the party acted like a responsible institution at the end of the day. And you saw the way in which constituencies and leaders all got together and they made a decision and then they made it happen. In the Republican Party, there was the same sense that Donald Trump was a crisis for the Republican Party that old-fashioned Republicans like yourself had. And they did make efforts. They did make efforts to try to turn him aside at various moments, but they weren't strong enough as an institution in order to do that. And what you have instead is you have a leader in his movement that have captured the Republican Party as an institution. So that means that the moderate,

the center right guys and gals that you like are stuck, where they've become the alien bodies in the institution. And so they have a choice. They can either leave the party, which is a very hard thing to do, because it means it strips you of any sort of power, or you can try to coexist within the party, which means that you have to cowtow to a leader that you don't believe in. And that's where we're at. Yeah. So that, I mean, that's literally, that's the Ted Cruz rationale, right? He called him a sniveling coward. Trump blasted his wife, said his wife was ugly, said his father was linked to the Kennedy assassination. Ted Cruz bent over and said, I can take it because I want to stay in power. Is that, is not my, what am I missing?

Or the JD Vance, as it turns out, predicament as well. I'm in love with J.D. Vance. I just have to tell you personally, okay, I put out on Twitter last week that I want to thank J.D. Vance for replacing me as the worst Donald Trump hire in Donald Trump history. I cannot be happier, Frank, about this guy. I mean, I just think it's fantastic. Okay, forget about his love affair with Kemp. couches and the fact that he hates the gat ladies. I just think this is one of the more fantastic

hires. And I predict he will be gone before long because Trump's polls are going to slip and Trump's going to panic and do all the shit that Trump is capable of. I talk about Biden for a second, though. Did he really want to stay in the race based on your reporting after the debate? Was that it a, it looked like a slug fight from the outside? Was it a slug fight or was it, you know, he was ready to go, but he was just trying to figure out the timing. He was not a not ready to go. I mean, the thing that you need to remember about Joe Biden, I talked about this earlier, is that he's a very proud guy. Right. And, you know, through his life, it's not just a stutter when he was a young kid and being bullied for that. When he ran for president in 1988,

he was, he got slapped with his charge of plagiarism and he had to drop out of the race. That was a great humiliation for him. When he ran for president in 2008, we all remember how he described Barack Obama as clean and articulate. And that was a humiliation. for him because people said that he was being, he was racist and he had to, he had to kind of slink out of that race too. And so his life is, he's experienced all these tragedies that have made him a very resilient person, but he's also experienced all these humiliations that have also made him an even more resilient person. And if you looked at Joe Biden in the abstract, you say, this is a guy who's actually psychologically very healthy. He's got grit. He's got resilience. He can face down adversity

and it doesn't destroy him. He always manages us to find a way to get back up. And in his head, I think you looked at the debate. He was like, okay, this is another episode of adversity for me. I screwed up. I was humiliated, but I'm going to do what I've always done in my life and I'm going to muscle through. The problem being, you know, the thing that he was trying to muscle through is the fact that he's old. And there's nothing that you can do. There's no amount of will that you can summon to get past the fast that biology is like counting your clock down. Right. Yeah. And there's a sadness to that. I mean, this is the, I think, the mistake that these Fox News anchors are making They're blasting his geriatric status.

And the meantime, the only people that are watching Vox News are geriatric. I mean, they're buying like catheters and like walkers in commercial interruptions. I just think is it? That's delicious. No, right. But for the grace of God, go I. So why are you doing that? So, all right.

So let's talk about his relationship with Vice President Harris for a second. Yeah. So you talked about his relationship. In order to talk about his relationship with Harris, when you talk about his relationship with Obama. Because Joe Biden was a very loyal. vice president to Barack Obama, but he was a very unhappy vice president for long stretches of the administration. Barack Obama actually needed Joe Biden to fill in gaps in his resume. So Joe Biden had this

expertise in foreign policy. He had this expertise in dealing with the Senate. Barack Obama hated dealing with the Senate. So he was happy to outsource that to Biden. And he gave Biden some really hard jobs like ending the war in Iraq or dealing with the migration crisis in Central America. And Biden felt he knew that he was always the punchline of Barack Obama's jokes or the circle around Barack Obama. Joe Biden would give these long monologues about his grandpa, fit again. And it was like it would become a punchline for Obama. And they would roll their eyes. And Obama like to make fun of Joe Biden in public and just needle him because it was it was good material for him. And so when Biden comes into the presidency, he's determined to have a different relationship with Kamala Harris.

On a formal level, it makes sense because he's able to say, you know, he hated how Barack Obama would refer to him as my vice president. So he's, Kamala Harris is going to be described as the vice president. And we're always going to do our, you know, we're always going to, as a matter of process, loop her into decisions, loop her staff into decisions. That was all the most formal means of expressing respect that he could think of. But as a practical matter, because Joe Biden is so self-confident, because Joe Biden has been around the block so many times, he feels like he doesn't have gaps in his resume. So he didn't actually need Kamala Harris in any meaningful sort of way. And because he was dealing with crisis after crisis, he just never developed a

relationship with her where he became, it was a mentor, a pupil relationship, sorry, teacher pupil relationship, mentor-mantee relationship. That just never happened. And so she drifted. And look, the vice presidency is like, is funny. It's the basis for a TV show on HBO. You can get a lot of laughs out of telling jokes about the vice president. But the one thing being harder being vice president is to be a former vice president's vice president. And so I think there was like a measure of, of hazing that happened in the job. And I just don't think that all the difficulties of the job earned him and earned her any sympathy with him, which they probably should have. You know, it's just, I mean, look, I mean, everybody's had a problem with it. Richard Nixon,

you know, I mean, Eisenhower said a month into, you know, before the election day, they asked them, oh, can you think of something that Nixon contributed to the eight years of your presidency? You know, give me a week. I'll think of something. I mean, I mean, these people have never gotten treated well, right? And so, I get all that. But where are we now? He immediately endorsed her. Was he trying to big foot Obama or he was like, this is the right person for the job?

I think that what happened was you had a lot of people within the Democratic establishment come to him and basically say, this has been chaos for the last month. And the only solution to chaos is order. So we need an orderly process here. We can't have another month of chaos. If we have any chance of beating down Trump, we just need to pass the torch onto her. She may not be our favorite candidate, but she is the candidate who's there and available. And I think she ended up, she's ended up surprising even the people who were calling for her to get the nomination with her performance in the first couple weeks out. What's so interesting to me is that when I was reporting on her vice presidency, she just didn't have a sense.

The problem was she didn't know who she was. She didn't know who she was as vice president. She didn't know how she would relate to him. She didn't know politically what type of persona she wanted to embrace. There were moments where she would be like, okay, I'm going to be the administration's emissary to the white working class because she was doing this work on union. And Biden's political people are like, what? Really?

That's what you want to be? Like, you don't realize like that's not going to be, that's not going to be a battle that you're going to win. You're not going to, that constituent suit is never going to be your base. Why don't you spend a lot of time talking to women voters or black voters because that's more opportune, politically opportune for you? And we could use your support there. And she was reluctant to do that at various points in the administration.

It was only after the Dobbs decision when Biden, as a Catholic, really struggled to talk about the abortion issue. And everybody in the Democratic Party knew that this was their best shot at winning the midterm elections, that she started to go out on the stump and she started to talk. I think people who were watching her carefully could see that, she was actually getting better as the administration went on. But she was stuck in that Lester Holt interview where she said, I've been to the border. She was stuck with the impression everybody had of her as a candidate in 2019. So people didn't actually know that she was getting better over time. Can she be Trump? I think it's going to be so hard. But, you know, I think things have lined up in such a way that what seems like it would be a pretty impossible task when,

Joe Biden passed the torch now feels to me like it's plausible. There is the fact of the map where it didn't seem, it felt like Georgia and Arizona had slipped away from Trump. And now because she mobilizes different sets of voters, those states look like they're more plausibly in play. We haven't actually seen polling from those states yet. So we don't know, we don't know for sure. But I think the interesting thing that I've seen.

in the polling is that there was this sense that her support among white, that she would have less support among white voters than Biden did because of some sort of latent racism or the like. And that doesn't feel like that's been the case in the polling so far. So she's been able to hang on to the Biden voters and she's been able to expand them by winning back black and young voters and some Latino voters. And if she's able to continue that and build on that, then yeah, She's got a shot. I want to talk about it, if you don't mind, I want to talk about a couple more things. The first thing is the Dobbs decision, because I think if she does have a shot, one of the reasons why she will have a shot is women's reproductive freedom in the United States.

Of course, 14 states now have different types of restrictions on that freedom. Why do you think Biden was slow on this? You write about it. He was slow to respond aggressively to the Dobbs decision. Of course, the Dobbs decision, people listening in, was the revocation of Roe v. which was the national right to get an abortion in the United States. So I tried to take people inside the room of those discussions. And the one thing that would happen is every time abortion would come up,

even tangentially in discussions about other health care issues, he would ask about were there exemptions for the religious conscience of the providers? He didn't want doctors and nurses to be forced to engage in procedures that they considered to be morally abhorrent. And the thing about Joe Biden is, like, his Catholicism is no joke. It's, you know, it's very hard for people to understand that because so much of our elite is so secularized, so much of now, I'd say, like, even a lot of the circles around Trump and Biden are so secularized that when you encounter a politician who's got real faith, he writes about how when he was a kid and he saw nuns, he knew that nuns were home.

And he wears rosary beads on his wrist. You saw that in the Oval Office speech. Those are beads that Beau brought back from Mexico. He was really, I think the idea that he was disappointing the leadership of his church weighed on him enormously. He felt really guilty and torn about all of that. And the whole subject just made him feel uncomfortable. And so he wanted to try to avoid it until Dobbs made it unavoidable. And even then, it took him about two weeks to get to the point where they were issuing executive orders, proposing alternative solutions in the face of Dobbs.

And only then that happened when there was that young girl from Ohio who had to go to Indianapolis to get an abortion and her doctor. And for him, it became a morality tale that was very black and white. It was about bullying people. And then it clicked into place for him. And he felt, okay, we can move on all this. But they had to ask towards it to Kamal Harris to go out on the stump to talk about it all the time. To Fayette is a fascinating part of the book. I want to switch to another fascinating part of the book was the lead-up to the Russian-Ukrainian war. He really tried to stop the war. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that he was doing, try to get that war not to happen. One of the things that happens very early on the book is that they unexpectedly get a phone call from Vladimir Putin on the second day that they're in the White House.

So the calls that you do as a president are very carefully choreographed on the first couple of days. And they're especially choreographed for Joe Biden because Joe Biden's verbosity means that he'll end up talking to a foreign leader for hours and hours and the schedule gets all gummed up. And Putin calls, and there was this question, how do you respond? And a lot of the people in the administration who were partisan Democrats like, well, screw this guy. He just messed with our elections. We don't want to talk to him. Let him wait in line. And Biden's response was, look.

know that Vladimir Putin's going to cause me trouble. And my best shot at dealing with him is to treat him like he's big man on campus. And so I've got to show him respect. And that was a lesson that was learned during the Obama administration where Obama had described Russia as a declining power. And he felt like that that had aggravated Putin. Let's say it insult to injury. It was a declining regional power. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The worst thing you could say about Russia. And of course, Henry Kissinger went bonkers. When we had Kissinger meeting with Trump during the transition in December, he explained why that remark was so damaging to our relationship of Vladimir Putin. But go ahead, keep going. Well, so, all right, so over the course of the next couple months,

he tries to show him respect. He meets with him in Geneva, as opposed to on the sidelines of another meeting. And they have a conversation. He's trying to set a very blunt tone with him. That's also friendly. He wants to tell him, hey, don't hack our systems. Don't, don't. Don't. Don't, engage in military adventures. At the same time, he's trying to do it in a very jocular sort of way that maintains a relationship. But our intelligence about Russia is fairly exquisite. And so starting in October, we could see, we basically intercepted Russia's war plans. And we could see what they were going to do several months in advance. And there were two big missions that he had that the administration had. One was persuading Vladimir Zelensky that the threat of invasion was real and that his government

needed to, his military, needed to take pretty extreme measures in order to prepare for that invasion. And they were very frustrated that they couldn't get Zelensky, at least in their conversations with him, to take the warning seriously. As it turned out, Zelensky was doing more in private than he was telling the United States because he didn't fundamentally trust the administration. But there were things that he didn't do in the end that probably could have been decisive to stopping Russia from making some of the major gains that they made in the first couple days of the war. Then the other goal was to try to do everything that they could with Putin to give him an off-ramp. And so Biden would have a series of conversations with Putin where he was trying to get him to seriously engage in a diplomatic

solution. I think those efforts were colored by a sense that Putin was dead set on invading. And so there was nothing that you could do. But you didn't want him to claim the moral high ground, to claim that there was any pretext for an invasion. So you had to at least create a record that showed that we were doing everything diplomatically possible to stop a war. I didn't think that weren't. So, you know, I'm looking at this presidential election and I'm looking at what actually the major issues, the next president will engage in. And there's really two. There's ending two wars and trying to bring them to the best possible outcome. There is the war in Gaza, which I expect will be over by the time that the next president takes over. But there is the possibility still, because of the deal with

Saudi Arabia, that you can leverage diplomacy to do something big and transformational in the Middle East. One of the great accomplishments of the Trump administration and we need to give them credit was the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and some of the other Gulf countries. And there's the possibility of doing that with Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is the most important country in the Muslim world so that if you could engineer a rapprochement between Saudi and Israel, you'd be saving in a way you'd be saving Israel at a moment when it's becoming a pariah in various parts of Western Europe in the United States. States and having the Muslim world embrace them. That would be a very incredible thing. And also, one of the important things is keeping Saudi Arabia out of China's orbit. And so that's another part of why this normalization deal is a big deal. So I think either Trump or Harris will continue to pursue that. And there's a Palestinian state that is kind of the necessary prerequisite for Saudi Arabia

going along with that deal. And so there's a lot of diplomacy there. Then there's this question of Ukraine. And it's pretty clear that it's, you know, Ukraine has fought this war so courageously for so long at such incredible expense for its people and its economy. And no nation can can continue fighting forever and ever. And at a certain point, there's going to have to be diplomacy. We look at what's happening in Russia. You know, Russia seems to be making all these gains right now within Ukraine, they've got the military upper hand. But, you know, Russia's military spending is also ultimately probably unsustainable. We've been saying that throughout this war, but inflation in Russia is real now. There's 7% of GDP is spent on the military. And at a certain point,

that bill is going to come due. And unfortunately, Russia would be ending the war with the upper hand. And so it's the difference between having a president who is committed to Ukrainian, the Ukrainian nation and the president who is not committed to the Ukrainian nation and the defense commitments that they're willing to make to Ukraine's future to guarantee its independence over time are kind of the biggest delta in how this war ends. You need a president who basically has Ukraine's back that gives them maximum leverage in whatever. negotiations ultimately happen with Russia. Yeah, it's interesting. A couple of my friends wrote this op-ed about Trump's plan for the Ukraine in the Wall Street Journal last week. And it was literally

fantasy land, you know, suggesting that Trump was going to, you know, help the Ukraine get into the NATO and fortify it with $100 billion with arms and all this crazy stuff. It's just that these are wishful. Trump, Trump loves NATO so much. Why would you, you know, he's going to want to expand it. Yeah. I was saying to my buddies, are you just projecting what you would like Trump to do as opposed of what he's actually really going to do? All right. Well, you wrote an amazing book. Every author I have like five things we come up with at the end of our podcast. And so I'm going to read you these and then I want you to react to them, sort of like a Rothschild test before I let you go. Okay. You ready?

Okay. So if I'd say the word politician, you think what? I think the greatest implement of democracy, that democracy doesn't work. unless you have people who are willing to get into public life and to treat it as a vocation where they actually learn over time how to do it right. Yeah, and it's brutal. It's brutal for these people. I mean, one of the reasons why we have these jokes about the politicians' brains is that the politicians beat the brains out of each other. They spend billions of dollars telling each other that they're stupid, right? And so we think all of them are stupid. Okay. America, Franklin, if I say America. You know, I think to me, it's still the greatest nation on planet, the greatest experiment in history, yet at a moment when its century has passed and it needs to be able to create a new narrative for itself, a new economic narrative for itself, a new sense of its place in the world.

And I think that the Biden administration did a very noble job trying to kind of clear. to the idea of American leadership, they did a very noble job of trying to revive America as a manufacturing nation seizing, you know, with the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, that they're going to be very essential things to this century that America will be the world's leader in producing. But America's leadership and America's economic might are very tenuous things. And so the actual political leadership of the country makes all the difference in the world about whether those things continue. No question. Okay. You have three people here. I want you to react to these names. You're ready? Yep. Donald Trump. I think that he remains.

Democrats don't like talking about democracy anymore. The new watchword is freedom. And I think democracy, I understand that to some extent because democracy became kind of almost an academic type of concern. If you don't care about protecting and preserving American democracy, at this stage, there's no argument that a politician can make to you that's going to convince you otherwise. And yet, I still feel like those arguments are the most salient ones that we see the ways in which this administration, his next administration is going to be based on experience. Paul Krogman had this comment about how the first Trump administration was malevolence, tempered by incompetence. But this time, I think that they're going to actually, and as they've

displayed in this campaign, they're much, much more competent outfit than they were the first time around. There are a lot of things that they, go ahead. No, no. I mean, I think I just didn't, not to interrupt you, but Krugman is right and wrong. I think there was a lot of garden variety of Republicans. They didn't realize how malevolent Trump was and they were trying to stop them, which looked like the Keystone cops, you know, but now he's got a very willing group of acolytes. It's these sort of anarcho-Christian Heritage Foundation people. You know, they're coming for the country and they want to reshape, reframe the country. They don't like black and brown people.

And so they're like, wait a minute, black and brown people could run the country under a democracy. Well, we don't like that. So we're going to try to do everything we can to liquidate that democracy and change the rules. And they think they're right. I'm sorry. I didn't mean interrupt, but, you know. No, no, thank you. That was a good amendment.

Thank you. If you disagree, tell me. But, I mean, that's really what it is. I don't. That's why I can't support him, and that's why I'm actually supporting her. I'm very open about it, you know. Let's talk about Vice President Harris. I believe the right pronunciation of her name is Kamala.

Is that correct? That's correct. Okay. And so, I mean, I mean, this asshole, I mean, okay, but let's talk about her for a second. Then we'll talk about his response to her. Look, I think what I've appreciated about the way that she's run this campaign, It connects to what I've been talking about about politics, is that a lot of American politics has felt so suffocatingly serious that there's been no joy in it. And I really appreciate the way in which she's gone about not just prosecuting her case, to use a phrase, but by making arguments and by speaking in a way that feels like she's happy to be there and that politics is actually a joyous pursuit.

And I've just been amazed by the way in which Democrats who were so in the dumps suddenly feel this sense of ecstatic jubilation based on her presence. And it's not just that she's making arguments, which was something that the Biden campaign. The Biden campaign was non-existent before Harris took over. There was nobody making arguments. There was nobody prosecuting a case. There was nobody out there raising money. So just having her doing those basic things is, I think, very helpful. A 60-year-old Joe Biden would be doing that.

He's just at 81, it's harder for him to do. Yeah. Okay, so we've talked about all of these people. My last one is Joe Biden. Yeah. You know, his legacy in some senses rests on the outcome of this election. So if Harris loses, the fact that he passed the torch to her a year or too late is going to look bad. It's going to – everybody will Monday morning quarterback.

the ways in which the Democrats should have done it better because of the threat that Donald Trump poses. But let's say we set that aside and we just look at what he's done as president. And you look at the series of crises that he was confronted with and how he managed them. You look at the pandemic and the fact that within when he arrived in office, there weren't enough shots because the government had broken its relation. The Trump administration broke its role. relationship with Pfizer because of Trump's spitefulness. They were able to ramp up production of the vaccine, a very intimate connection between government and industry, so much so. And they developed a plan to get shots in arms. Within six months, you could stroll into a CVS or Walgreens and get a shot that saves

your life. It's one of the greatest things that government has ever done. It literally saved, you know, several million lives. They get no credit for it. You look at the way in which the American economy needed an infusion of new life. And so the government started to engage in industrial policy where it's acted like an investment bank and through both the infrastructure bill, the chips bill, and the inflation reduction act, they've put America in a position where we're going to have the byways of commerce that make it possible to continue to have effective ports and roads that gets goods to market, that we have a chance to have the semiconductors that everything in our world runs off of. And we're going to be the leaders in clean

economy as fossil fuels run down their course. Those are incredible things. And then he dealt with some of the most difficult foreign policy challenges around. He ended the war in Afghanistan, which was something that Trump and Obama knew needed to happen, but they didn't have the stones to do it. And he may have done it in a way that was messy and unacceptable, but he did it. that's helped us create the possibilities for the next chapter, an American foreign policy. And he's dealt with the largest land war in Europe and a war in the Middle East. And so far, knock on wood, neither of those conflicts have escalated in dangerous sorts of ways. The Ukrainian nation is safe and secure. There still is a president in Kiev. And the Ukrainian state will

continue to survive. And, you know, Israel's in a pretty tough place now. But I think you can argue that it's, despite everything, it's actually managed to win its war in Gaza, maybe at the expense of its its reputation. But there's a whole series of the most difficult things in the world. And we had a guy who's got a lot of experience muddle through those in a way that I think was dignified and about as good as any president could do in those circumstances. Yeah, I think it's an amazing story. I think you wrote a book that people should read on a number of different levels. They'll learn about politics, but they'll also learn about the way of service, if you will, how somebody like Joe Biden, whatever you think his flaws may be, this man was there to serve.

And, you know, I mean, let's face it, you're a journalist, I'm a Wall Streeter. Okay, we can be cynical, right? Franklin, we're prone to some levels of cynicism. Only some days of the week. Yeah, right, exactly. But here you go. You know, here's a guy that I think has delivered for the American people, and I think he will be well regarded. I also think that as talented as these politicians are that are working with Donald Trump, I think there's a flaw in what they're doing. And I think it's about to get exposed. And she may end up beating them,

which would be, to me, one of the biggest rankouts of all the time. The black women beating the white racist cracker. I would, I mean, he's sort of like a ritz. cracker, right? Because he's like orange. You know what I mean? He's like a ritz cracker. It would just be like a really a joyous thing for me. But in any event, I want to thank you so much for joining me on open book. The title of the book is the last politician inside Joe Biden's White House and the struggle for America's future. It's written by Franklin IV. It's coming out in paperback soon. And I really highly recommend that you read it. Thank you, Franklin for joining us. Thank you. So Franklin IV wrote an incredible book about President Biden and Biden's phenomenal political career, the ups and downs of it. It's also interesting to get Franklin's

take on Vice President Harris. I have said on this podcast and the rest is politics that Kamala Harris is underappreciated in terms of her skills as a politician. And when politicians have low expectations, it surprises people and then they get this big blast of publicity in the media. And so we'll have to see if this honeymoon period that Vice President Harris has right now is sustainable. She's certainly raising gobs of money and she's got people lining up to support her. It's an interesting coalition that she's forming and we'll see what happens to her. But the tell here is who Joe Biden actually is and what Joe Biden has done for America. And ultimately, I think history will reward Joe Biden with his service.

This is a man whose life was fraught with tragedy, losing his children early in his life. And then obviously, Beau Biden dying of brain cancer. 10 or so years ago, nine years ago, the president, I think, will have a spot in our hearts over the next 25 to 30 years. And of course, if Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump, I think his legacy exponentially grows, but I still think he's got quite a legacy. And this book is a phenomenal book about what really goes on behind the scenes. Particularly the most interesting stuff for me was stuff related to Volodomar Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. Anyway, worthwhile read. Come me out in paper bag now.

Ma? Yeah. All right. You feeling better? Yeah. All right. Good. All right.

So you're ready? You're doing. I'm good. I got to put you on the air, Ma. You're the favorite person on my podcast. So you're ready? All right, Ma. So I just interviewed a guy that wrote a biography about Joe Biden.

Okay. What do you think of Joe Biden, Ma? Do you think he did a good job? Yeah, I do. All right. All right. So tell me why. What are some of the things you think he did well?

Why? Okay. And then what else? I like him. Right. You like him. person, right? He's like a... I like him as a person. Yeah, you know, he's not... Right. Okay. Um, let me ask you this, okay? What did you think of him as vice president? Do you remember? I like him. All right, so you like,

you like, you like, you think he's a decent guy, okay? He's not racist. Right. You know, he kind of flows with life. Mm-hmm. But no way he could beat Donald Trump, right? Oh, no. No. Right, so they had to make... Donald Trump. Right. So you think the, the woman, weirdly, is coming on strong now, right? Or no. Okay. Okay. A little bit too giddy, right? So if I was advising and tell her to be a little less giddy.

Yes. Okay. Yeah, I mean, he's... Right. He's stumbling over himself, the poor guy, right? Yeah. All right. I do agree with you, though.

So we're going to leave it there because I, not only do I agree with you, but you say it better than me, which is why I have to invite you on, because you're not to summarize things, okay? So we're going to, wow, you're laughing like Kamala Harris now, Mike. He can't laugh. It's a serious podcast. Okay. Okay. Right.

You want something more serious. All right. Message or see? All right, Ma. Thank you for joining Open Book. Okay, I love you, Ma. All right, I call you later. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book.

Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or. Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.