The Bulwark Podcast - Evan Osnos: Biden Brims with Confidence

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

Biden has the air of a man with no doubt about his campaign strategy—which is not exactly soothing to some Democrats and Never Trumpers. Plus, Hur's questionable framing of his report, the RNC bloodbath, jealous elites, and Tucker can't get no respect. Osnos joins Tim today. show notes By Evan: Joe Biden's Last Campaign Rules for the Ruling Class Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now Wildland: The Making of America's Fury Plus: Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes"

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. All right, so we've got a few items in the news relevant to my past employers that I want to give you my thoughts on. First, our friends at the Republican Accountability Project have relaunched Republican Voters Against Trump today. I was the political director for this group back in 2020. I got to tell you, this was the most fulfilling

professional experience of my life. For those that don't remember, we gathered testimonial videos from regular Republican voters who wanted to come out and explain why they were opposing Trump. And then we're going to turn clips of those videos into ads. So we ran in the swing states. We dreamed up this concept as a pretty straightforward ad campaign where, you know, I don't know, a handful of people sent us videos and we tested out the best ones and turned them into ads. But it turned into something much more. A community, a movement of like-minded people who were looking for a political home emerged. We were awash in these videos from people who needed to be reminded that they weren't the crazy ones. People told me it was like how they imagined coming out of the closet would be. I know something about that. Or it kind of sometimes sounded like they're confessional at an AA meeting. That's something I can't relate to,

thank God. But the fact that those are the comparison points show how critical this was for people trying to change their political identity and find a place of people that were like-minded. So I wanted to take this opportunity to say, hey, I appreciate everybody that did it in 2020. We got to saddle back up in 2024. So if you're a former Trump voter, unfortunately, people like me, we don't count anymore. That's why I'm not doing it this time. If you voted for Hillary and Biden, I don't know that your message is quite landing with the voters we need. But if you're a former Trump voter or you know somebody who is, go to RVAT.org to submit a video.

I look forward to seeing the ads Sarah and the team produce. And even though I'm not directly involved this time, they'll be getting my unpaid advice here on the podcast. Okay, one other news item from another place I used to work. A bloodbath at the Republican National Committee. 60 people laid off. This is significant in a few ways. Number one, the money problems for Team Trump are very real. President Biden is already on the air with the ad that we discussed on yesterday's podcast, really strong ad. RNC is meanwhile, totally behind the eight ball and

reorganizing their whole organization right now. So this is, I think, significant in giving the Biden team a leg up as they try to maybe change some of those poll numbers here over the next couple months, over the spring. Number two, I think it's significant because this is pretty dramatic. The RNC is a building that is very stagnant. There's a lot of lifers in there. It's where people think they have secure jobs. So just a mass firing like this in the middle of the cycle, I think is going to lead to some hard feelings, maybe some more food fighting. And that's something we're going to be monitoring. Lastly,

I do think there's one green shoot for the Republicans. While Lara Trump is now in there, and she's going to be funneling money to her hubbies, daddies, lawyers, there's another person involved, Chris LaCivita. I worked with him. He spearheaded Trump's campaign pretty shamefully. He knows the RNC. He can recruit staff people who aren't weirdo hobbits, who are not gnomes. And so they do have enough time to right the ship. Biden has a head start here. They have enough time to right the ship. If the bozos get out of his way, that's a big if. So that's something Mark Caputo will be watching for us. Check out his Magaville newsletter if you hadn't he told readers last month that this was coming so make sure to go

to the bullock.com sign up for his newsletter all right up next evan osnos all right welcome to the bullard podcast i am here with the prolific Evan Osno, staff writer at The New Yorker. He wrote the biography, Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now in 2020. He interviewed Biden again this past January in his profile, Joe Biden's last campaign created a bit of a stir. Evan, thanks for doing this. My pleasure, Tim. It's fun to be with you. All right, I want to get to the Her Report today, but first I just have to start with your lead, which was you in the Oval Office and President Biden wanting to show you where Trump sat and

watched the revolution. So just talk to us about that exchange and why you led with it and sort of Biden's view on the stakes here. Yeah, you know, that was one of those moments that was not something I was expecting. I kind of come into the Oval Office for an interview and I've prepared to take my seat. And right off the bat, I asked him about that space, basically about the Oval Office. And I could tell he was slightly bored by my question. And so then he immediately was like, let me, follow me, I'll show you where Trump sat and watched, as he said, the revolution. And we kind of go back into the little private chambers behind the Oval Office. And it was pretty clear that the Secret Service

did not expect him to go off piste, because they were sort of startled to find him in the corridor. And he said, he made a joke about it. He's like, hey, guys, it's a raid. And then he keeps walking, we end up in this little dining room. And that's where, of course, Trump sat on the afternoon of January 6. And it was a kind of interesting moment, because I kind of thought, frankly, that when we got there, he was going to unspool a little speech about democracy or something like that. But he didn't actually. What he did, all he did was sort of let out a kind of rueful laugh, I think is how I put it in the piece, because he sort of wanted it to speak for itself. Like here you are, you've got

a portrait of Lincoln on the wall. You've got this place that has been essentially the sanctum sanctorum for presidents. And this is where Donald Trump sat with his Diet Coke and his remote control, rewinding to watch violence at the Capitol. And there was an element, it was kind of a revealing moment to me because I realized there's a lot that Joe Biden thinks is self-explanatory about Trump. That it's almost like he finds it hard to believe that people don't see Trump the way he does. And that is a kind of running theme that I think is important. Yeah. Did you ask if he kept the super DVR? The TV is still there on the wall. And is it massive? Is it like out of place? How big this TV is for, you know, what would be appropriate for the space? Yeah, of course. It's a kind of ludicrous intrusion. I mean, the room is this like,

you know, dark wood. It's got this, basically this treasured portrait of Lincoln with his commanders on the eve of winning the Civil War. It's got these challenge coins by military units. And then there is something that you got at Best Buy, like, you know, as a Black Friday special, taking up an entire wall. I was looking back at historical portraits of that room because I wanted to understand just how different it was. And there used to be like this classic portrait on the wall, something from the, you know, national galleries or something. And Trump took a look at it and was like, no, we could do better. Let's put up a flat screen. I like to bring it up a lot too. So I like that the president likes to bring it up. We're very in line. I think it is a nice encapsulation of how pathetic and unpatriotic

Trump is. Okay. I want to get more to your piece, but we have a little bit of news today. So Robert Hearst testifying on the Hill, the transcript of the Biden-Herr exchange has now been released as well. I'm going to go through that, but I'm just curious first, since you spent a decent amount of time with him in January, and then the Her report comes out about a month after that, how did that match with your experience? And what was your reaction to that assessment of Biden? So I talked to him a little bit before that report came out, whatever it was, a few weeks before. And to be honest, going into that interview, I think like any reporter, I was pretty attuned to this question of what's his mental state like?

I mean, this is the biggest question facing the Democratic electorate in some ways. I mean, I was really focused on that, partly because I'd interviewed him over time. And I, you know, I'd interviewed him in 2020, and going back to 2014. So I sort of had some baseline for comparison. And what I concluded quite clearly over the course of this experience, I was with him for about 40 minutes interviewing him. And he didn't bungle a name. He didn't bungle a date. What he is, is more or less what you see is what you get, which is that his voice is,

with the exception of the State of the Union, his voice is pretty thin and has weakened. And, you know, he kind of coughs a lot. He clears his throat a lot. He's got this acid reflux thing. His gait. The gait. Yeah. I mean, he shuffles. And that is now a visible and sort of completely obvious fact. But what is also obvious if you're talking to him is that his mental process is the same his mental status as far as i could tell was unchanged over that whole window that unchanged because when you say unchanged you're not talking about you're seeing him on tv i mean you interviewed him for the book you've been interviewing him for what a decade and a half now right i started 10 years ago actually

it was 10 years ago in 2014 i interviewed him him for the first time. And what I would say is different is that he does less of the filling of the space. There used to be a kind of compulsive, reflexive, you know, let me wrap my arms around you with my words element of Joe Biden that was like, goes back to just who he is as a human being, kind of wanting to win over every face in the room, which is something that he's been doing since he was like in his 20s. He doesn't do quite as much of that anymore. There's like a little bit of a, I don't need to do that now element to it, which is part of what he was getting at, you know, when we're in that dining room, like he doesn't need to fill the space. And I got that feeling. And some of that is a little bit testy. He's a little bit like, I think there's a piece of him that feels like I've made it here. This is the apex of American political power.

I have the right to decide what I want to say and not say, and I'm not going to filibuster just for the sake of winning you over. That is a little bit noticeable to me. If I go back and compare it, for instance, to how I talked to him 10 years ago, when he was a little bit more seeking to impress on every story. So interesting. The vice presidency wasn't enough, still seeking to impress as the vice president had to get to. Oh, definitely not. The vice presidency was not enough from his perspective. I mean, he always used to diminish it. I think there's been a TV show about that. Okay. So in the testimony, one thing that jumped out at me, the Her testimony, I'm reading this transcript this morning. First, the Beau Biden story was completely told incorrectly by both Her and Biden, then they go back and forth in the year he's like what month did beau die oh god it was may 30th then was it 2015 when he died that's right

so he has the date and year right on that which which her misrepresents in the report then biden kind of misrepresents in the transcript because he says that her asked him about it but he didn't biden was just using it as a as a point in time a couple other things from the transcript that jumped out at me and he's just funny still and he's still on the ball for somebody that is losing mental capacity her showing him some pictures and trying to ask when this was when this was there's one picture where he has his arm around lindsey graham he's like that one must be old because i got my arm around lindsey graham there's another link he says there's a lengthy discourse on the torque of electric vehicles

versus his corvette and he makes some car noises and he talks at length about cars i mean that that seems pretty joe biden to me a decent amount of cursing so anyway you better just look at the transcript well what were your what were your takeaways to the car point at that point if you're looking at the transcript you know joe b Biden is kind of rhapsodizing about how fast these new electric vehicles go, to which Robert Herr replies, according to the transcript, whoa, that's kind of interaction that is a much more three-dimensional normal interaction than you would have suspected based on her's eventual report, which made it sound like, you know, Joe Biden is struggling to come up with the major events of his own life. And I mean, this transcript, if I was a Democrat who wants Joe Biden to be elected, this transcript, I should go and hand deliver to every American on their doorstep, because it makes the case a lot more clearly

than anybody can do in summary, partly because it's a five-hour interview over a long time. I think one thing that's worth pointing out that I certainly didn't get from Robert Herr's report was when they're having these discussions about dates, it's because they're doing this really minute reconstruction of things like how did you hang your folders in your file cabinet in the years 2017 and 2018, Mr. President. And there are points where Biden is quite literally sort of irritated by the PICAU nature of it, to use a good New Orleans term. I mean, like, he's like, I don't have a clue.

He says over and over again, like, I don't have the foggiest idea, some version of that. Meaning not like, who are you and where are we? But I really did not pay attention to whether or not my file folders. I mean, at one point, her is asking him why were some in red folders, some in yellow folders, some in blue folders. And Biden is kind of saying to him, I don't know, that was somebody else's job. I don't know. Also, just your point about the three dimensional nature of it. The thing that I think is the most false about the context of the initial her report versus this transcript to me, is that the point her is trying

to make when he says that he's elderly and that he has trouble remembering things the ostensible reason why he brings that up is to say that i don't think a jury could hold this person responsible right because he seems like a forgetful old man right and so to me that's pretty damning right that's her's assessment is that this person is so forgetful and so elderly that even if he did commit, you know, a crime here, I couldn't put him on the stand because the jury wouldn't convict him because he seems so out of it. That's an insane framing when you compare it to the transcript. Okay. Like there are plenty of things to poke holes about and Joe Biden, he's not perfect. But I think that is the thing that comes off to me as the most

false. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's amazing to me what her left out of his report that he said at the time, like, for instance, at one point, he is praising Biden's, what he calls his photographic reconstruction of the geography of the Naval Observatory, he then is over and over, he's saying, after Biden answers some question about something, he says, oh, that's helpful. Oh, thank you. That's very helpful. And at one point, Herr himself is kind of running aground on some of this detail, and he apologizes for misremembering, is his word. This is Robert Herr speaking of himself. Robert Herr, a vigorous middle-aged man with, one thinks, a adequate memory, is having trouble, as he says, he's talking about a couple of questions that he described as he acknowledged were clunkily phrased. So I think there is a way in which

that piece that was not in Herr's report, Herr's report, of course, focuses entirely on these questions that we've been talking about, is a pretty impoverished version of what actually happened over the course of those two days. Mr. Kerr, what is in the rules is you don't gratuitously do things to prejudice the subject of an investigation when you're declining to prosecute. You don't gratuitously add language that you know will be useful in a political campaign. You were not born yesterday. You understood exactly what you were doing.

It was a choice. You certainly didn't have to include that language. You could have said vis-a-vis the documents that were found at the university. The president did not recall. There is nothing more common. You know this. I know this. There is nothing more common with a witness of any age

when asked about events that are years old to say, I do not recall. Indeed, they're instructed by their attorney to do that if they have any question about it. You understood that. You made a choice. That was a political choice. It was the wrong choice. Back to your article. There were a couple of concerning items in the article that i want to go through with you but before i do that it's a tour de force it's very it's it's lengthy it's long it's a capacious it's a capacious article plenty of room so i want you to kind of sum up what your kind of main takeaways were from it before i start to you know start to bed wet a little bit i think my dominant impression,

the thing that really I walked out of there and then became only clearer and clearer over time, as I talked to his aides and everybody else, is that this man has no doubts about what he is doing. Like, Tim, I think that's the hardest thing for people to get from home. You sort of assume, given all of the atmospheric pressure around him, all of the static involved in this, you know, the Her report and his memory, you might think, is Joe Biden, you know, sitting at home, looking out of the window and asking Jill, am I doing the right thing? And you come away, actually, from the time with him, you realize, nope, he's not doing that. And that is a, it's a very big fact. And some people will hate that fact. And some people will like that fact because there are people who say, well, maybe he should be having more, more self-examination than he is, but it's important. I thought to make that a really clear point. He believes in himself. He believes in what he's doing. And now his job is to make other people see him the way that he sees him. I'm glad I came away from the article with what you wanted me to, because my note here

in big bold on my notes is overconfidence. I just I have a little bit here. So here's one thing that worries me about the story is that Biden, I think, has in his own self-assessment has kept proving people wrong, right? Like there have been doubters for a long time for him. And most recently, some of this goes back further, which maybe you can speak to, but there's the Afghanistan example during the Obama administration where he is so convinced that he's right about this. And this leads to one of the long exchanges in the Her report. There is the 2020 primary where everybody counted them out. The 22 midterm where everybody said that they were

going to have a bad midterm. The recession, all the smart people were convinced that there was going to be a recession. He said there wasn't. So again and again, it seems to him that the experts have been wrong, that he's been right. And I just wonder if that is leading to a little bit of false confidence. At some points, I was reading an article and I had this image of the guy at the craps table that's on a hot run and keeps quadrupling their bets. It's like, are we coming to a crash here? Are we about to crap out? Do you think that is right?

I mean, is his overconfidence based in surprising the experts of conventional wisdom so much? Or is there some nuance to that? The overconfidence has been a fact of his life for a very long time. Like the things you just named are exactly right. They're very present in his mind right now. They're some of the first things that he said to me when I started talking to him about this, you know, in this interview, honestly, he was dying to say, as he did, like they got it wrong in 22 when they said we were going to get our ass kicked.

They got it wrong in 23 when they said, and they got, and they're going to get it wrong in 24. He said, and then he said, of course, as you said, that they told me there was going to be, you know, he's kind of poking me. He's like, you and your colleagues said there's going to be a recession and there's not, but it really goes back much earlier than that. And it's been, and the reason why I mentioned that I think to him is that it's a feature of his whole self-organizing principle. It goes back to when he was a kid, you know, the old line, like, show me the boy at seven and I'll show you the man. And in some ways, what Joe Biden says of himself as a person is that when he was a kid, he was small, he stuttered, he wasn't the highest

performing kid in a class. And he made up for it, as he said, this is his term, I made up for it by being gutsy. And he did all of these nutty things as a kid, like these famous stories where he'd run between the tires of a moving dump truck just to show that he could run from one side to the other. I mentioned these to say that he developed what the great Richard Ben Kramer, you know, who wrote What It Takes, which still to this day is the best account of Joe Biden's mind written in, you know, in the early 90s that in there he captured something that biden describes of himself where he calls it gaming it out meaning i can game out things that other people think i cannot do you know i have the ability to do like any good podcast i have what it takes sitting up by my desk excellent good prop right there we can cruise the biden chapters together yeah so here's the thing this is part of what I like about Biden, what a lot of people

like about Biden, right? Like this gutsiness, the every man quality, right? He wasn't the, you know, Harvard kid like you writing for the New Yorker, right? There's something you like about that. You know, you like the fact that he is clear eyed, you know, about what he wants to do. So it's not as if I'm like, oh, this is a horrible trait to be confident or overconfident or that he was wrong necessarily about any of these things. But I just sometimes you wonder if it leads, you can get into a bubble, right? Anybody can get into a bubble and boy is the White House a bubble. And I see things in the article, like polling is broken. You can't get people on the phone. And to me, that's not confidence.

That's putting your head in the sand, right? Like some polls have been wrong, sure. But the polls were basically right in 2020. The polls are basically right in 2022. I keep telling people this and they're like, no, no, everybody said it was a red wave. I was like, yeah, the pundits said it was a red wave based on history. Pundits got it wrong. Polls got it right.

The polls were mostly right directionally. I mean, polls are not going to get it right to 100%. You know, there's still polls, there's a margin of error. And, you know, there were some mistakes in 2016, of course, but that doesn't, you know, match with what has been happening in reality. And the polls have been right in these primaries, like they've overstated Trump to a certain extent, and some of them are on the Republican side, but I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who's looking at this that that's because there's been this surge of independent Democrats who hate Trump who are voting in Republican primaries to try to undermine him. So I do wonder how you balance that, right? Like this confidence, this gutsiness with being

willfully naive about a really important challenge that's ahead of us over the next few months. I think you identified correctly, 100%, the fulcrum of the piece. Essentially, what I was doing over the course of this thing is laying out precisely that question, which is, is this level of confidence the sort of thing that sustains you at a moment when there are overwhelming doubts, or is it the kind of thing that history will look back and say he was captive to hubris? I mean, that is the question. I don't adjudicate, I don't come to a conclusion, because I don't honestly think that you can in the moment, right? What you can do is say that a fair reading of his life shows both successes and failures in that similar kind of habit of mind. I mean, look, when he ran for president in 87, as he said later,

only many years later, he said, I was arrogant. I didn't deserve to be president. That was an election as people, as readers of What It Takes will remember, having it by their bedside. He was, you know, he failed out of that race, having taken lines from other politicians, overstating his resume. There is a degree to which that same impulse, that kind of volcanic ambition to prove people wrong is also his greatest vulnerability. And we are living right now at a moment when it's not clear if this experience is going to be in the numerator or the denominator of that ratio of his life. And that is an anxious fact, I think. Yeah, I'm anxious.

That's for sure. Okay, so I'm curious on this point, something that was, you allude to in the piece, I'd like to pick out a little bit more, is how much he's letting in new voices, other advice, contrary views in. Obviously, he relies on a very close circle of advisors, Donalyn, his sister. There's an

anecdote that you gave that was, for some people, worrisome. For others, maybe a good sign that he is talking to people. Some of the names that were mentioned, Mitch McConnell, Thomas Friedman, Larry Summers, some merits and demerits to those choices. But I mean, is he kind of ensconced in an impenetrable bubble of longtime advisors? Or is he, you know, kind of getting enough points of view to challenge maybe some preconceived notions about the state of play? He's surrounded by a pretty static group of close advisors. And you know, this goes back to the transcript we talked about earlier today, in his interview with Robert Herr, he actually comments on that he says, Look, I've had a lot of these people around me for 2025 years. It's part of the reason why some of these

habits of kind of record keeping were just established years ago, and he doesn't, he doesn't sort of involve himself in them and his telling. But to your point, I think there is concern that when you don't have people around you who have a fresh voice who are coming in and saying, hold on, hold on, hold on. Why are we being so dubious of polls when we are doing our own polls? Like, how is it that the science of polling is broken if why are we still conducting our own? So there is a piece of that. There's two things going on here that I think are worth mentioning. One is they do their own polls internally. And I was asking around, I said, well, hold on, if you guys are so convinced that the science of polling

is broken, then why do you bother doing polls internally? They said, well, we're dubious of our own polls too. Meaning that they're getting polls that are showing, okay, this, you know, they don't, it's not like they've got polls that are showing Joe Biden, you know, winning in a landslide right now. They're also wary of what they see in those things for the same reasons. The people he talks to outside, the people you just named, you know, Mitch McConnell, and for reasons you rightly described, some people tear their hair out at that list. But let's remember, I mean, Larry Summers has been a thorn in the side of this administration for a lot of reasons. Challenging them like on the inflation numbers big time.

They're a contrary view. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there are others who I didn't name in the piece who he has reached. Basically, the pattern that I have picked up on is if somebody who is a public person, who Joe Biden knows their name, if they're out there trashing him on something, and he thinks that they're doing it in good faith, he's going to call them up and say, what's the deal? What are you doing? Why do you feel this way? And sometimes he then brings that idea into the room. So Larry Summers, prime example, Jason Furman, professor at Harvard,

who had been in the Obama administration and economist, you know, at one point, Furman was one of the leading critics of the administration's policy saying it was contributing to inflation and so on. Somebody told me that, you know, Biden had said, essentially, look, I know Furman, what's the deal? What's he saying? Why is he saying it? We should figure this out. But I think the reality is, yes, there are people on the Hill, especially who feel that Biden is too insulated by his advisors, and they want to talk to him more. Now, I will also point out, this is a completely endless fact. I think since cavemen, you know, members of Congress, the cavemen Congress were like, why doesn't the president call me more? So.

Yeah, that's encouraging that, you know, the Furman anecdote is encouraging that he's not just calling, you know, people who are puffing him up. And I'll say this, the longtime advisor thing is a green flag for me. You know, if you look at the candidates that I've worked for, and just from this cycle, Ron DeSantis is a great example of this. If you have a political candidate that doesn't have anybody who's been around them for a long time and sheds advisors constantly, that's a bad sign, right? Like that, that is a sign that a person, you know, is tough to work with, doesn't take feedback, doesn't take advice, right? I think there are a lot of negative externalities to that. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, one more

concerning quote is, this year's campaign will be centered on the freedom agenda. I like that, that part's not concerning. The focus will be overwhelmingly on democracy. I think that I am not one of those, it's like, you should never talk about democracy. People don't care about it. I think Axelrod's in the story talking about how people in Scranton don't care about democracy. I don't know. You know, I think in a broad patchwork of arguments, I think that it is an important one. The threat of Donald Trump is important. While I was discouraged by the Donald quotes in your article, I was encouraged by the first ad, which doesn't actually talk about democracy. I mean, it does kind of talk about the freedom agenda, talks about abortion and some other issues. So what is your sense of that, of like the Axelrod view and the Donlan view of, you know, how central democracy is going to be in this campaign and how they blend that or don't blend it?

It is a big debate, a sort of really substantive debate that gets at the heart of how they're going to prosecute this campaign. And I know it can seem to those civilians like, really, why is this such a big difference? But it is about what's in the foreground, what's in the background. I talked to Mike Donilon for this piece at some length because he is the person who is conceiving of and deciding what goes at the top of the list and what goes second. And it's always going to be some combination of what we call kitchen table issues. So how much does your grocery cost? And then the other question of, is the nation fundamentally at risk? And you'll notice that in the State of the Union, they did both. It was very striking to me. They started with the democracy piece. He starts off talking democracy piece. He starts off talking about

Roosevelt. He starts off talking about his predecessor and Putin and the threat to democracy. That's the freedom agenda. And Reagan and Ukraine. And exactly, Reagan and Ukraine. So that is the piece of Biden and Donilon that believe like this is the existential issue of our time. Then they spend probably twice as much of the speech talking about economic issues, like, you know, how do you make sure that working people have a fair shot? So that talks about going after corporate abuse, price gouging, talking about student loans, talking about housing, all of these kinds of things. So in a way, what they're doing is it's both there. But I thought that was a noticeable choice. If you're somebody who's

interested in this debate, they could have started with everyday issues like, you know, my fellow Americans, I hear your complaints about the struggles that you face every day. He didn't start with that. He started with we are being called by this bigger thing. So that right there is a sign of how they're trying to balance these two things, put them into some conversation with each other. There's another thing going on, which is there's a rhythm to a campaign.

And this comes through in what Donalyn said to me. In our interview, we said it clearly. I think in some ways, if you're not looking for it in the piece, you don't see it as clearly as he meant it, which is there's a different thing that you're going to say in March than you're going to say in November in terms of where the emphasis lies. Like, what is it that is the thing that gets people off their couch to go down and stand in line and vote? And Donilon's view, which is shaped very much by the 2004 experience, this is something that's important to mention. Basically, in 2004, in Mike Donilon's view, the Democratic Party made a mistake. It didn't understand that ultimately, in his view, that election was still defined by the traumatic overhang of 9-11 three years earlier, that that was still going to be the thing that made people decide who to vote for.

And he thinks Democrats made a mistake by talking about the economy, by talking about the Iraq war, by talking about hostility to Bush. He thinks those were wrong. And he thinks that actually, in the end, it was always going to be about this kind of primal trauma of 9-11. And in his view, that equivalent moment was January 6th. And that as you get closer to November, particularly as Donald Trump let Trump be Trump, and he talks, as we know he's going to, about violence and dictatorship and all the things he cares about, that that is going to only crystallize and enhance the clarity of the idea that January 6th remains the thing that this election is about, according to Mike Donnelly. Yeah, from head to lips to God's ears. I noticed they like talking about the January 6th choir. I had Ben LeBolt on the podcast on Friday, the communications director. He likes bringing it up. I've noticed that other advisors do. Biden will bring it up. And Trump playing into their

hands on this posted just last night that his first three actions are closing the border, drilling, and releasing the hostages, or whatever he calls them, January 6th hostages. On the Trump question, so the Biden team keeps signaling that they are itching for a fight on this and that Biden's itching for a fight. In your article, he made the comment that Donald Trump already is Herbert Hoover. He doesn't want to be Herbert Hoover. He already is Herbert Hoover. You know, there've been reports he's talking about how Trump is mentally weak. He thinks he has the better of them, that they can get them on tilt. What was your sense of that in that conversation? How much is he champing at the bit for this fight? I think he does feel as if they're on very firm ground on the economy. And I get the sense a

little bit that he kind of can't even really believe how good it is. I mean, the numbers are simply so much better than you might have imagined a couple of years ago. Set aside whether you think it's Joe Biden's doing or not. Just objectively speaking, if you're a financier in the United States of America on this day, you are a whole lot better off than you were four years ago. And so there's a piece of this that Biden believes is both a surface level political fact that he is in better condition for electoral politics because of the health of the economy. And then there's the underlying thing, which is a little bit more of what you're getting at, which is sort of where his heart is, which is that he believes that he has an alternative theory of how to grow the economy than most conventional Democrats have had for a generation,

which is, in his mind, you have to be willing to tolerate a higher level of inflation in order to prevent a higher level of unemployment. And that was how they went through this process. So when he is defending his record on inflation, he's sort of also defending his belief that people like Bill Clinton got the economy wrong. He doesn't name Clinton, but that's what he's essentially getting at. He's sort of arguing against a generation of Democratic Party politics. And the personal side that contrasts with Trump, you know, when you're talking to him, I mean, how much is he volunteering yet? I do think that there's this, you know,

there's kind of like the angel and devil on his shoulder a little bit with Biden, where like some days he wants to talk about the soul of the nation and be uniting. And sometimes he wants to talk about Trump being a son of a bitch and failing at everything. Right. And so how did you sense that in your time with him? You know, it's, that's a great way to put it to him. Cause there is a bit of,

there's a bit of the sacred and the profane here. You know, Biden is both a man who wears a rosary on his wrist and is also somebody who, you know, is happy to swear like a sailor. So there's a piece of him that, you know, he can hum the bars.

That's pretty normal for us Catholics. I don't know if you know about that. That's pretty standard. That's a pretty standard him that, you know, he can hum the bars. That's pretty normal for us Catholics, Evan. I don't know if you know about that. That's pretty standard. That's a pretty standard conduct. Fair enough. I mean, one of his most important stories is about his mother going in as a child when he was a kid and threatening to punch a nun for making fun of his stutter. So like these two things are fused in his mind, the kind of pugilistic faith.

And so in a way, look, I think there's a piece of Biden that is repulsed by Donald Trump, Tim. He's repulsed by him, not only personally, but also the man attacked the United States Capitol, which is a building where Joe Biden spent 36 years. He thinks of it as Valhalla. And this guy, Trump, sent his people in to break windows and literally defile the building. I remember one of Biden's aides had said to me at some point, you know, he misses being a senator, which is a completely ridiculous thing if you're the president of the United States. And like, have you seen the Senate? Do you really miss being there? But Joe Biden really does feel that way. He thinks it is a truly decent way to spend your days because it is a collegial act of making politics. I know

people are crying out like that's not the Senate today, but that's the Senate that Joe Biden has in his mind. It's the Senate of the mind. And in some ways, one of the things that really bothers him about Trump was that Trump doesn't believe in politics. You know, like he just doesn't. And I think there's a way in which Biden finds all of that, beginning with talking about violence, talking about women the way he does. All of that does just really drive Biden crazy. I want to get into a couple other things you've done. You wrote a great book a couple years ago called Wildland, The Making of American Fury. It's sort of related to this topic. It covers the 9-11 to January 6th period. And, you know, you had been abroad in China. You've written a lot about China as well, from China, and came home to write this story. I'd like for you to kind of sum

up what your main thesis was of it. And I want to get into one element. So I guess my thesis was really me just looking at the country and saying, what happened? How did this happen? Because you really felt it was a change. It was changed when you how long were you gone? How long were you in China? I was gone for 11 years. I was in the Middle East for a couple of years and then went to China and was there for eight years and then came back. And so it was, I guess, 11 years. Yeah, total. And I don't have any illusions that we were the promised land beforehand, but there were things that happened that did feel like a fundamental change. I'll just give you one example from the

book. I had been in this little town in West Virginia called Clarksburg, where I my first job out of college was at a little newspaper there. And Clarksburg was in the late 90s. When I was there was all Democrats, you know, and then it switched and it switched so profoundly, as we all know, West Virginia is now some of the most reliable Republican territory in America. And it's happened so rapidly and so thoroughly. I think a lot of people don't really know the story of how it happened and why it happened. And it's a story that is as much about how Republicans figured out an opportunity there as it is also about Democrats losing sight of a piece of the country where they used to have

really deep roots. I mean, in West Virginia today, there are still people, this is a fake example of somebody, but it's not impossible. There are a lot of people who have like an FDR portrait on their wall. This is a true thing. That's a very common fact. Kennedy for sure. Yeah. Yeah. The Kennedy, I mean, Kennedy, and we can talk about that, the Kennedy story in West Virginia is so important. And then they also now vote for Donald Trump. And so I wanted to understand how did that kind of thing happen? Because you can't understand how our politics got so furious, you know, sort of divided without understanding the dynamics in play there. And so that gets to the fundamental question that we hash out a lot on the bulwark, which is about this fury, right? And I think that there's some elements

of it. And maybe West Virginia is a unique example, because in some ways, it's legit. In certain parts of West Virginia, there's certain parts of the state that have really been hollowed out and hurt by globalization, etc. And yet, then you look at other parts of your book, you know, there's the Greenwich part, you know, the folks that have super yachts. My colleague JV Lass likes to look at the boat index and talk about how many boats are being purchased. Donald Trump has boat parades. Generally, if you have enough money for a boat, you're not exactly struggling. You haven't exactly been, you know, hollowed out by globalization. And so how much of this fury is righteous fury about ways in which elites really did let them down. How much of the fury is

decadence, right? Is jealousy, pettiness, right? What was your kind of assessment as you explored, traversed the country trying to get to the bottom of this? That's a great question, Tim. I mean, I chose the word in the subtitle very, very deliberately. It's the making of America's fury is how I decided to describe this book, because some of it was made, meaning it is a product of, in some cases, a set of industries that are designed to generate fury. It is also a product of a set of ideas that became normalized. I'll give you an example. So you mentioned Greenwich, which is Greenwich, Connecticut, where I grew up, and is its own way, a kind of

fascinating place to look at the evolution of the Republican Party. It is quite literally where George H.W. Bush grew up. So it is the... That was my people. Right, exactly. The Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans. Those were my peeps, you know? That's exactly it. You know, Prescott Bush, as you know, the father of George H.W. Bush, he was like the man of the town. He was like, he ran the local town meeting. He then eventually became the United States Senator. He was Eisenhower's golf partner. And you went from that to the fact that the head of the Republican town committee in 2016 endorsed Donald Trump for president. And I was just kind of fascinated by how you went from that to that. The genteel to the furious, right? Yeah. To the rage filled. Yeah. Yeah. And the truth is,

you know, there's always been an element of both. And even today, as you know, you know, you'll sometimes you can find yourself talking to somebody who owns a big boat and is also then talking about politics in the most kind of furious way, and you find it kind of bad. So I think to your question, part of what changed is about how people feel connected or disconnected to their fellow American, which is a fancy term, but is a big idea, meaning one of the metaphors in the book that I really found powerful was the building of these stone walls in Greenwich. And in Greenwich, you go back to the days of the settlers back in the 18th century, and they would build these little farmer stone walls. And over the course of the 90s, when you had money being generated on an extraordinary scale

in places like Greenwich and elsewhere, the walls started to grow, quite literally the walls, meaning that they went from being these little tiny Robert Frost metaphors of, you know, good neighbors, to being actually barriers of fortress making, they were about being inside and who is outside, they were a reflection of a perception of threat, the idea that, you know, I have stuff that other people are going to try to take from me, and I must defend my stuff. And there was a period in which that metaphor, it was really a reflection of a kind of vision of the country that became much more, to use your good word, there was a sort of jealousness about it of saying, I must protect myself against those who will seek to take things from me. To me, there's like a high school cafeteria element of all of it. I always kind of want to just move to the side. I think that there is, you know, particularly in Appalachia, because your

book covers all these, you know, areas, right? You're in Chicago, you're in Greenwich, you're in Appalachia. And I do think I'm much more sympathetic to the Appalachian element of this, like just this overhaul of the industry and over, you know, overhaul of the economy in those places. But there's a lot of parts of the country where there is this elites jealous of other elites, right? It's like, I'm doing well financially, or we're doing well politically, but they're getting more attention, right? Like they're more popular than I am, you know, and I do think that that is the shallow fury drives a huge percentage of what we're seeing right now.

Somebody once told me over the last few years, and I wish I remember who it was, but it's a really vivid way of describing it, that the typical, ultimately the ideal Trump voter is not the out-of-work coal miner. He's the assistant manager at the car dealership in town. And what that means, and the assistant is the key word there, he wants to be the manager of the car dealership. And he's, on some level, he's pissed, right? You've met that guy.

I've met that guy. That guy's even a little bit more sympathetic to me than the car manager who's also for Trump who's pissed because he's not getting the key to the city anymore because the key to the city went to the teacher who was hispanic and they want and if he felt like he didn't get it because he's a white guy right and it was like dei or wokeness or something was and like back in the 60s he would have been the big man in town and now you know like that is the person that bugs me more. I agree. Both of those archetypes are in the Trump move, but the latter one is the one that bugs me more.

I want to ask you about your last article, before I let you go. And I have a little surprise for you. I have a little dessert. Rules for the ruling class, how to survive among the elites while pretending they're your enemy. You start that article telling the tale of Tucker, McNair, Swanson, Carlson, frozen food air. I found, I didn't find this actually, I don't want to overstate it. I bumped into on the internet, as one does, an old video of Tucker, much younger Tucker, bowtied Tucker, you know, frat swoop, talking about Bill O'Reilly. And I'd like for you to listen to this. I say before that, that, you know, Bill O'Reilly is really talented. He's more talented than I am.

You know, he's got a lot more viewers than I do. He's a better communicator than I am. But I think there's kind of a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick. And again, as I say, the shtick is sort of built on this perception that he is the character he plays. He is every man. He's not right wing, he's a populist. This kind of Irish Catholic populist fighting for you against the powers that be. And that's great as a shtick, but I'm just saying the moment that it's revealed not to be true, it's over. The moment he gets caught slapping a flight attendant on the Concorde for not bringing

his champagne fast enough, or barking at one of his subordinates to take the brown M&Ms out of my bowl and get me a bottle of Evian, or something like that. The second that makes page six, it's over, right? Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. And just nobody is that person, especially not someone who makes a million dollars, you know, or many millions of dollars.

Well, Evan, that kind of sounds familiar. It was prophecy. I mean, it was, he was describing the world that he came to be. I mean, and you know it's a reminder of too is in some ways one of the tragedies of tucker carlson was that he was a capable writer in an earlier phase of his life like he i reread his george bush profile recently for some i forget what the content was it's really great totally really great yeah and then he he abandoned all of it really i mean he just

i the reason i wanted to write about him was because his life of extraordinary advantages one after another beginning at birth continuing through the as he acknowledges in sort of the outer reaches of the internet that his girlfriend's father got him into college when he couldn't get into colleges. Things like that, that in a way, the idea that he then became the warrior against the elites is a chef's kiss moment of such extraordinary, I don't even know what to call it, Tim. My words have, I'm out of the words. It was kind of amazing to me how many people are running against elites now who are card carrying charter members of the elite. What do you think is underneath it?

You know, because is it, because it's like, you could think about it and it's like, is it income inequality? Because income inequality is a lot worse. Or is it decadence, right? Or is it the fact that like we need drama in our lives? Humans need drama and we don't have real hardship right now. And this is the meanest way to look at it, right? How do their hardships look compared to hardships of past generations? How do their lives look?

You know, and maybe so maybe it's just this need for drama or maybe it's not. Or maybe it is more legit. I don't know, where do you where do you land on all that? I mean, the thing you're describing, which I completely agree with is, there is an element of, I'm going to mangle it slightly, but Fukuyama describes it as a kind of strategic boredom, a kind of profound spiritual level, boredom. And I think that certainly applies to people like Tucker Carlson. I think there is another element. So he's utterly unchallenged in any deep, real way, and therefore directs his energies in all of these other ways of trying to kind of remind himself that he's alive. I think

there is this other element, which is simpler and, to your earlier point, is at the heart of the matter, which is he tried and he lost out. He tried to be George Stephanopoulos. He tried to be the guy at the center ring of American political commentary. And his television show was canceled on CNN. Then his television show was canceled on MSNBC. He tried to make a website that would be the conservative version of the New York Times. That did not come to pass. And so finally, he goes to Fox News, and there he finds himself. frustration with the reality and the recognition on some level deep within himself that he's never going to be the person that everybody respects for their knowledge and wit. And so he'll be something else. He'll be somebody standing outside and shouting at the people within.

Evan Osnos, I really appreciate your time. Staff writer at The New Yorker, recent profile Joe Biden's last campaign. He got to see where Trump watched the revolution while he sat and drank some Diet Cokes. Thank you so much, Evan. Let's do this again sometime. My pleasure, Tim. Thanks for having me. We'll see you, brother. Ladies and gentlemen, this time around, the revolution will not be televised. As we proceed to give you what you need. Oh, nine bucks. Get it live, brother. Ladies and gentlemen of the court.

In the hearing against State of Hip Hop vs. J.R. Trotter. I present Exhibit C. And the heroine against the state of hip-hop versus electronic I present Exhibit C When I was sleeping on the train Sleeping on Meserolab out in the rain Without even a single slice of pizza to my name Too proud to beg for change, master in the pain When New York was calling southern rappers lame But then Jack and I slain

I used to get dizzy spells, hear a little ring The voice of an angel telling me my name Telling me that one day I'ma be a great man Transforming with the Megatron, dog spitting out flames Eating whack, rappers alive, who now chained I ain't believe it then, I was homeless Fighting, shooting dice, smoking weed on the corners Trying to find the meaning of life in the Corona

Till the 5%ers rolled up on the s**t and informed them You either build or destroy where you come from The Mack know your projects and the third wall is slum It's quite amazing that you rhyme how you do And that you shine like you grew up in a shrine in Peru Arrest my case The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.