The Bulwark Podcast - Ezra Klein: A Path to Defeat

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Top Democrats say they don't see a way for Biden to win, and some are resigning themselves to being the resistance against Trump, despite the threat he poses to our democracy. Batten down the hatches���this interview is a tough listen. Ezra Klein joins Tim Miller. show notes Ezra's piece from February  Ezra's book recommendation, "Health and Safety: A Breakdown"

Hey, y'all. Late yesterday, I recorded a conversation with Ezra Klein that was, I think, very important. It was en of the aisle, Mikey Sherrill, a congresswoman out of New Jersey, who I'm a big fan of, came out and said that she knows President Biden cares deeply about the future of the country. That's why she's asking that he declares that he won't run for re-election. Very explicit about that. Richie Torres, who we had on the pod a couple weeks ago, offered maybe a less direct statement than Sherrill's, but one that strongly implied the same. Nancy Pelosi on Morning Joe this morning was super interesting. She said, it's up to the president to decide if he's going to run. We're all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short. She was then asked, do you want him to run? And then she said,

I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that's the way it is. Whatever he decides, we go with. And then she follows up, let's just hold off whatever you're thinking. Either tell somebody privately, but you don't have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week. Not exactly a ringing endorsement there from the Speaker Emeritus. Both Biden and Trump spoke last night. Watch both Biden at the NATO summit. He was pretty good. I like the substance of the remarks are good. I encourage you to listen to them. He's on the right side of this argument, of course, on NATO. It doesn't assuage the concerns we have, right, because they're not related to his ability to give a teleprompter speech or support for NATO. I want to see a more proactive message and a clearer message in contrast to Trump. That's the thing that has been missing for the last two weeks,

you know, in addition weeks, you know, in addition to, you know, more freewheeling environments, which we're going to see on Thursday in a press conference. So I think that will be interesting to monitor. And lastly, I watched Trump last night in Doral. And here's the thing. There's a lot of deranged stuff in there. He's repeating a lot of his lies about, you know, migrant crime and the economy. And he does these goofy things like Hannibal Lecter and calling Chris Christie fat. But if you just see those clips going around on the internet, I do think you missed something from watching the whole 90 minutes, which is that Trump is offering a clear message against Joe Biden, what I'm asking Joe Biden to do to Trump.

Migrants are coming. They're committing these crimes. They're taking American jobs. Joe Biden, what I'm asking Joe Biden to do to Trump, right? Migrants are coming. They're committing these crimes. They're taking American jobs. Joe Biden doesn't care. It's clear the message. His trolling of Joe Biden for being old is very clear. And you can see the crowd is into it. You can see his attitude is more, I don't know what to call it, Trump convivial is the word that came to mind. You hate to associate that with Trump, but he's lighter. He was lighter in mood. I'm going to do a bit on this for YouTube. So if you guys want to go over to YouTube, you can watch it. I think it's important to understand the two parts of Trump as we look to this challenge this year, both the lying and the insanity and the crazy along with this lighter side and with a clear message dotted with jokes that is resonating with a certain type of voter.

And so that is what has to be combated and kind of pretending like he doesn't have that other speed. JVL wrote a newsletter about this. How about Trump has two speeds, totally crazy and then slightly more sane and he gets graded on that curve. If you don't recognize that second speed, then you can't beat an enemy without understanding the enemy. So anyway, with that, this conversation with Ezra is super important. Make sure you're buckled up,

you're sitting down, have a glass of rosé if you want, and we'll see you on the other side with Ezra Klein. Hello and welcome to the Lowry Klein Family Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. On today's pod, somebody who's getting recognized more and more recently, New York Times columnist, Juicebox Mafia Don, fellow Savage Lovecast guest, author of Why We're Polarized, host of the Ezra Klein Show. Ezra Klein, what's happening, man? Good to be here. Just orbiting you for years and months now. Seriously. We lived across town from each other. Never quite made it happen back in the Bay Area days. You were spotted, though. I've got spies. And you were spotted at a WNBA game with Commissioner

Adam Silver. I was hoping you could pass along to him a couple of notes from me. I would like a truncated season with no back to backs, keep the in-season tournament. I've got some concerns about the second apron and I've got some complaints about the Nuggets ownership team squad. So if you could just kind of pass a little note to him next time you guys are hanging out. I have to assume that it is refreshing for the commissioner to go to a basketball game with somebody,

you know, who knows as little about basketball as I do. So it got to be annoying to go with all these game with somebody who knows as little about basketball as I do. So it's got to be annoying to go with all these people who have a lot of opinions about basketball. Imagine how nice it is when someone has no opinions about basketball. I bet that was very nice for him. Yeah, like sitting next to a clear blue lake. He could just kind of space out, no second-hand discussion. Okay. Well, next time you go to a game, I've got some notes for you. You can just take those or leave them. We are obviously going to spend most of the time talking about what's happening in the Democratic Party that you

a little bit more acquainted with than I am. So I want to lean in on your expertise here and talk about some fanciful thoughts I have that the Democrats in good standing are telling me are fanciful, including yesterday's guest. But first, I think it'd be just valuable to just kind of talk about why we're so concerned about this and the threat. And so I'm wondering, what worries you most as you think about a Trump second term, Project 2025, etc.? I think the way to think about Donaldald trump and this is going to be very much playing to type for me right is as a i almost i wish we could have an ai ezra just yeah you you basically might right um uh sam altman once said to me you know what are human beings except for

uh reinforcement learning mechanisms with energy running through them. It's like, hey, I'd like to think of a little bit more than that, but maybe not that much. There's something there, souls. I think the way to think about Donald Trump, if it is more compelling to me, is to think of him as a probability distribution.

We don't know how a second Donald Trump term would play out. The first Trump term, some of the things that we feared were going to happen in the first couple of years did not happen. And then the last year between the runaround with COVID and the way his administration responded to that, between January 6 and much broader, I think it's actually a problem that we always talk about January 6, the effort to subvert the election was much broader than January 6th, and in some ways, much more nearly consequential, the things that Trump and others were doing behind the scenes. And so with Trump, you're always looking at this question of, are you going to end in these tail probabilities, which, are they 20%? Are they 30%? Are they 40%? I'm here to speak in my language right now as we're calling. I'm thinking about getting a tail risk tattoo and putting it on my neck, because that's what I've been talking about so much. But yeah, continue. You might get a Trump who is tested by severe international crises, China invading Taiwan, further instability in the Middle East.

What happens if Hezbollah and Israel go to war in a much more full-on way, right? A million terrible things can happen. One of the things I always say about Donald Trump right now is that in his first term, Donald Trump governed in an uneasy coalition government with the Republican Party. The House Speaker was Paul Ryan, at least at the outset. The Senate leader of the Republicans was Mitch McConnell. They were traditional Republicans from another age with a different set of commitments. And I would not say what they did primarily was restrain Donald Trump, but they had their own agenda and they often drove Donald Trump towards their agenda, even as Donald Trump was doing his own things too. And people forget there were big areas in like

17, like where there was disagreement and like they were free to disagree, like not on core Trump issues. Right. Now there is no coalition government. I mean, there are differences between Donald Trump and other members of the party. I mean, even the Project 2025 dimension, you see some of this, right? Project 2025 is written by people who, with good reason, believe they might serve in a second Trump term. They're people who, I think, believe in Donald Trump in a very real way and believe that what they are doing is fashioning an agenda that turns his intuitions into frameworks, into policies, et cetera. Donald Trump is in many cases not where they are on things and whether or not he engages enough for that to matter is a completely unknowable thing. But nevertheless, the difference between Project 2025 and the pre-Trump Republican agenda

that he went in and ended up in, you know, working towards like repealing Obamacare is that the Project 2025 people see themselves fundamentally serving Donald Trump. They're not trying to make Donald Trump serve them. And that's a very different situation. Parties, even when they're united, have internal disagreements, fractiousness, tensions. But this is a party that understands Donald Trump to be truly and thoroughly its leader. You see Laura Trump now as co-chair of the RNC. You see a Supreme Court that just gave Trump immunity from virtually any kind of presidential action. And so you're really dealing with a truly unrestrained Donald Trump.

Yeah. Yeah. This democracy is a threat. It's an existential threat. All these kind of phrases that are thrown about, I've thrown them about, thrown about on the op-ed pages the new york times and on msnbc where i frequent what is your sense for like how real that threat is like do you think that like trump might try to stay in 2028 like how likely do you think that is like where on the autocracy spectrum from urbanism or something even less autocratic than that to Mussolini, where are you seeing Trump in that tale? I think that the question of the threat Trump poses to democracy, I always find this hard to talk about. You're dealing with somebody with fundamentally anti-democratic instincts. So then you have a couple of questions following from that. What could he do with those instincts under normal conditions, right? The federal government, for instance, will be full of people who share Donald Trump's suspicions about democracy,

right? If you aren't where Trump is on a bunch of these things, you're not going to get a high up job. In the Trump administration, you're not going to be named to the Supreme Court, probably, right? There's all kinds of things where Trump is just going to stalk the high levels of American politics and American governance with people who seem malleable to him, with people who maybe actually have a more ideologically, like what Trump's instincts are is not anti-democratic in like a substantive, ideological way. It's if he doesn't like the democracy stands in his way personally right trump is narcissistically anti-democratic but there are people behind him he just kind of likes the vibe of like mussolini yeah you know gaddafi

and kim jong-un better like that feels stronger yeah they got the good costumes he likes the outfits people parade yeah but then they're the people who are substantively more anti-democratic. And when you think about things that Peter Thiel, you know, the sort of tech billionaire who's funded a lot of Trump and Trump-associated people like J.D. Vance has written, when you think about the things that the Claremont Institute people write, right, there's a crew behind him who can come very near power or actually be in power, who have more substantive views about whether or not we should be a democracy. Then you get into these questions of crises, right? I mean, one of the scariest scenarios to me has always been like, what if you have a Florida in 2000 style outcome in 2020, now in 2024, right? Like what will Trump do during something like that?

What if the Supreme Court does try to check Trump and he's just like, no, right? Like how many battalions do you actually control? When Trump is talking about mass deportation, right? And he is talking about pulling in a series of internal security forces like the National Guard that do not currently roam around going house to house, trying to pull people out and then, I guess, extrajudicially deport them. If Trump manages under conditions of deporting immigrants to create a larger internal security force, right, that is much more significantly under his control, what might he do with that under a position of stress like we saw after the George Floyd

protests? What might he do with that in a situation where even if he did not try to stay for a third term, maybe he wanted, you know, Vice President whomever to win in 2028, but they did not. And Trump doesn't agree that they did not. And in fact, it's very important that the enemies in his enemies and in the press and Democratic Party are not able to steal the election from his hand chosen successor, whoever that might be. What might that mean? So you're dealing with this sort of mixture of the rise of a political faction that has, let's call it, complicated relationships to democracy, and the grip of control of a leader who has no particular record of respecting democratic outcomes, and who has an articulated agenda of developing a

security force that he has much more fundamental control over. And then you're saying to yourself, well, I hope all this works out. And that seems like a hell of a thing to think right now. Seems like a hell of a thing to believe is going to work out. All right. Doesn't seem to me like it'll work out either. So that's alarming when you consider the political opposition in our democracy that is currently charged with preventing him from entering the White House again, I want to play for you something that you said back in February about Joe Biden and his fitness for running for re-election. people who work with him. How does he seem? How read in is he? What's he like in the meetings? Maybe not a great sign that I felt the need to do that, that a lot of reporters have been doing

that, but still. And I am convinced, watching him, listening to the testimony of those who meet with him, not all people who like him, I'm convinced he's able to do the job of the presidency, that he is sharp in meetings, that he is sound in his judgments. I cannot point you, even now, to a moment where Biden faltered in the presidency because his age had slowed him. But here's the thing. I can point you to moments where he is faltering in his campaign for the presidency because his age is slowing him. This distinction between the job of the presidency and the job of running for the presidency keeps getting muddied, including by Biden himself. Let's just take that first part first really quick. Do you still feel that way, that there's not anything that you could point to that would demonstrate that it has limited his ability to do the job of the president outside of the public speaking side of it? I think there are two ways of thinking about this. But as I've said on my show, I think that first, there's reason to believe his capacities have deteriorated further.

I mean, I really do talk to a lot of people in the Biden administration who I've known a long time. And I really would ask them consistently how he is in meetings. Same. When you said that, this is why I wanted to play that clip, exactly, because I also have a couple of friends in the Biden administration, not as many as you, having come from the other side. But when we have drinks, I always do the thing that's like, so he's really OK, right? Yeah, he's OK, right? And it's that instinct to ask that question that in retrospect is pretty concerning. Yeah.

Look, I'm not in meetings with Joe Biden. He does not have me in for the columnist roundtable things that he doesn't seem to really actually do. I've heard of like one of those happening, right? You're not on the Scarborough call sheet. Yeah, I'm not on the Scarborough call sheet. What I was told repeatedly was that he was making decisions that the people who were sitting with him felt fairly confident in him, felt confident in him. And I did not certainly at that time have reason to believe that they were lying to me. And I don't believe they were lying to me, which I think is important. I think now there's this sort of thing happening

where people are looking backwards and saying, oh, this guy has been completely out of it for years now. And there's some cabal around him that has totally hid this from you. That isn't, I even think what the reporting is really suggesting. Age deterioration in your 80s can happen fairly quickly. And most of the reporting seems to suggest that people who, you know, we're seeing in 2022, and then some again, late in 2023, that there's a lot of, oh, my God, something has changed here, right? I'm that there's a lot of like, you know, he is getting worse, right? That the, that he used to basically have good days and occasionally it'd be a moment, but like, that's a little weird. He seems to have trailed off in a sentence there. That doesn't look great

to me. Like, you know, he's, you know, naming people from the past, that kind of thing, but it's quite rare. Right. And, you know, it could just be verbal miscues. The mind mixes things up. I get my words wrong sometimes. If you listen to Kamala Harris's defense of Biden right after the debate, she says very confidently that we're three years after the two-year anniversary of Dobbs when she meant three days. That's stuff the mind does all the time. It seems like there's been a fair amount of deterioration. The way in which, though, I do look back on that line and feel like I was like fuzzing up the boundary I was drawing to be a little like friendlier to Biden than maybe I should have been was that obviously communication

is part of the job of the presidency. And the argument I made in that piece was that Biden was proving himself deteriorated as a communicator and not just deteriorated as a communicator. Because remember, I do that piece sort of right after he skips a Super Bowl interview and then gives that press conference in response to the special counsel report where he mixes up Mexico and Egypt. He's not doing interviews fundamentally. Like compared to other presidents, he's sitting for very few interviews. And when he does sit for them, he's going to very friendly outlets.

We now know he's been going to this like radio outlets where, you know, we at least know in some cases that are hand feeding the questions beforehand. So if you're tracking how many interviews the president does, when he does these weird radio outlets, right, where they're like giving them the questions that counts as an interview, but that's not really what we're looking for here. He's going on things like Jay Shetty's, you know, mind of a monk or whatever that podcast is called, going on smart lists, like going on Conan, like doing things that are easy, that are safe, but mainly not doing things at all, right? Not doing the Super Bowl interview. Then he has this press conference where he's got literally one job, right? Reassure people about

his memory, you can't do it. So my argument there was this guy has deteriorated substantially as a communicator. And communication is also part of the job of the presidency, being able to show people that you should be in the chair as part of the job of the presidency. Being able to show people that you should be in the chair is part of the job of the presidency. Sitting with a foreign leader and persuading them of your position is part of the job of the presidency. Sitting with members of the Senate from either party and making good case to them

that what you're doing is the right thing to do and they should support you is part of the job of the presidency. And nothing we are seeing and nothing I am hearing is suggesting that Biden is strong in any of those conditions. You know, and there are obviously days, right, like you hear something like AOC comes out, which I found very, I would like to know a lot about the strength of AOC's current support for Joe Biden. Actually, I was going to get to AOC, but let's listen to AOC. Spoken to the president over the weekend.

I have spoken with him extensively. He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed. He had reiterated that this morning. He has reiterated that to the public. Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race and I support him.

Now, what I think is critically important right now is that we focus on what it takes to win in November because he is running against Donald Trump who is a man with 34 felony convictions that has committed 34 felony crimes and not a single Republican has asked for Donald Trump to not be the nominee. I'm here to win on this democracy. I'm here to win in November. And what's critically important is what the president, I believe, that the president needs to do, and I have communicated this, what the president and the White House should do in order to make sure that we win in November. And that is making sure that we pivot and working and increasingly commit to the issues

that are critically important to working people across this country. How are we going to expand Medicare? How are we going to expand Social Security? How are we going to provide relief to people's rents and mortgages? And if we can do that and continue our work on student loans, secure a ceasefire and bring those dollars back into investing in public policy, then that's how we win in November. That's what I'm committed to. And that's what I want to make sure that we secure. If you told me everything that would happen and then told me, like, had me guess, like, who's going to be strongly in support of Biden? Chair of the Appropriations Committee in the

Senate, Patty Murray or AOC? I would say Patty Murray will be out there for Biden and AOC will be like calling for his head. And instead, AOC is saying listen i spoke to him he told me he's not stepping down this matter is closed we're not talking about it anymore and patty murray's out there like ah this doesn't seem like a good idea like maybe the president who i've known forever what's happening there i literally have no idea i cannot psychoanalyze this i don't i don't get it i'm not going to pretend i know why any politician does what they do. One of the arguments I've heard, because the squad has stood in real support of Biden, is that some other squad members are facing primary challenges. The fact that Bowman was considered insufficiently supportive of Biden was one reason he lost. So there's a kind of

squad solidarity to try to not have a wedge driven between them and the Democratic Party at a time when their seats are potentially in peril. That's not true for AOC, but she maybe stands in solidarity with the others. Beyond that, I don't know. But what I will say is clearly Biden talked to AOC and to give her credit here, presumably seemed convincing in that conversation with her. But what we also know is that the variance of Biden conversation to conversation is very concerning. So he's got, again, like good, good ones. And then as we're hearing from European diplomats who have sat with him, as we're hearing from staffers, as I'm hearing from staffers, we're hearing from members of Congress, like they're not always good. One of the suggestions

is that one reason Patty Murray has come out in a, you know, in the way that Democrats were worried about Biden are like, we should have that Democrats who are worried about Biden are, like, we should have a serious conversation about the best path forward, not he should not run again. But there's been reporting that in meetings with her, he's been in very rough shape. And so it's possible that some of the variance is simply what people have seen from him personally and what they have not. But my belief that he can do the job now on a communications level, that I'm totally comfortable with a guy whose argument for why he was barely coherent at the debate or for much of it is that he shouldn't

schedule events after 8 p.m. when the presidency is not a job that is necessarily stops at 8 p.m. You know, and a guy who there's clear deterioration and we want him in charge for four more years of aging. Just briefly to add to everything you just said, we also know they're protecting him from calls. And there was a lot of conversation in kind of our world. This is a little bit of the behind the curtain thing where it's like, Joey Biden is a glad hander. He loves calling people and chewing the fat.

Like, why hasn't he called X? Why hasn't he called Y? Why hasn't he called Z? I had several of those conversations in the last few months. But this one thing is curious. The Ilhan Omar position that Joe Biden is actively complicit in a genocide, and we also need to stand with him completely. This is where I know that I'm new to the coalition. I struggle to square the circle

on those things. But if we begin this conversation and we're deeply concerned about democracy, it does feel like a weakness of the political argument to say hey we're going to put this guy through that nobody really thinks is going to be able to do the presidency well at age 86 and you can just trust that he's going to have some good unelected people around him and that if he gets really bad he'll do the right thing and then Kamala will be that right like it's just It's not a strong pro-democracy argument, I wouldn't say. I'm writing about this right now. I think one lesson of this period, and I am having the same experience that every congressional reporter I know is having,

which is no one who I speak to off the record believes Biden will win. And virtually no one will say that on the record. And, you know, maybe the people I talk to are a kind of selected group. But John Heilemann, the chief correspondent of Puck, has said the same, more or less. Throw me out the pile. Jonathan Martin, the incredibly well-sourced chief political columnist of Politico, has said basically the same. The crew at Punchbowl News used to write Politico's playbook. They have said basically the same thing. We're all kind of

having the same experience here. So how might you kind of square the circle? A Democratic party where top Democrats believe that if Joe Biden is on top of the ticket, he will lose, but also are not coming out and calling on him to resign. I think there are a lot of ways to say it, but I think one thing that is being revealed is it on whatever they believe intellectually, viscerally, they do not believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. In some ways, one of the views on this that I found both strangest, but in a weird way, I respected it was it's Jared Golden, right? The Congressman from Nebraska, I'm sorry, of Maine, published an op-ed in a

Maine newspaper saying, look, Joe Biden is obviously going to lose to Donald Trump, but he shouldn't be replaced on the ticket because it's completely fine that he's going to lose to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump would be president and he's not an existential threat to democracy. He's just a Republican who I don't agree with on all issues, but who I'm going to try to work with where I do agree with him and try to constrain him where I don't. And that is not my view of Donald Trump. But that is at least a consistent view. Right.

Like, I think like if somebody wants to say, like, my view of Donald Trump is that it would be bad if he wins, but it's not, you know, any different than any other election. And as such, a Democratic Party should pull some, you know, big switcheroo and, you know, pull out all the stops to beat them, like, fine. Golden was unusual in saying that. But I think if you look at how a lot of these Democrats are acting, that is sort of what they believe. That if you stack up the list of possible consequences of coming out against Joe Biden, right, that like, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party or parts of it are mad at you, that it puts you in this kind of uncomfortable place with your colleagues, or with your voters, or with certain, you know, constituent groups that support you, whatever, it's just a problem. Like, you don't want to be out there out front, like, you don't know how the party can replace him. You don't want to be blamed for any of this. You just stay quiet and walk the calm path to defeat. I think it is clear. People are weighing

this set of things. It would be quite unpleasant for me personally to come out against the president as an elected official in an Democratic party and weighing what will happen if Donald Trump wins and saying, in a revealed preference way, I can live with Donald Trump winning. And I've had people say that to me off the record, to be fair. I've had top Democrats say to me, basically something like, I don't know why all these Democrats who think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are. But the reason I'm acting the way I am is because I don't think that. Who the fuck is this? Out your sources, Ezra. I'm about to be in leaking text mode over here myself. Like, that is crazy.

That's great. Why? I guess it's consistent, but it's maddening. No? I find it maddening, but I do find it consistent. Look, you can say this is true in a lot of things, right? It's a charge Republicans always throw at liberals, which is that if they really believe climate change is such a problem, they wouldn't fly on planes.

And I think that people's means ends are less connected than this. We've only had one coup attempt recently, and it was the person that is on the ballot right now. So, I mean, there's something to be said for that. If I were hearing from top Democrats saying, listen, I think our best path to winning is still Joe Biden. I think that, unfortunately, Harris is a weaker candidate. And I think that an open convention process or a blitz primary would leave us in a worse place. And, you know, these are all bad options, but Joe Biden is the least bad option. Fine. I just want to say this because it is, I don't think you can understand what I'm saying if I

don't. That is not what I am hearing from anybody. Like nobody says that. Nobody says Joe Biden's best chance of winning. Nobody even says they think Joe Biden can win. I have not had one top Democrat say that to me, nor has Joe Biden come to any of them with a plan for how to win, right? Like think of the bind Joe Biden is in right now or Joe Biden's team is in right now. In order to make up a gap with Trump, which he has shown no ability to make up so far. And he's now gotten quite a bit worse. He has to campaign aggressively in places that are fundamentally unfriendly to him, because

those are the voters he needs and the kinds of media he needs in which to reach them. And he needs to campaign in ways that convince voters of something they have not believed for quite some time going well before the debate, which is that he is fit for the presidency. So he needs to campaign aggressively. But to campaign aggressively is to put himself in a position where he might fail or falter again in public, and his campaign might entirely collapse. So you can campaign aggressively and maybe make up the gap, or you can campaign cautiously, but that's like walking a calm path to defeat. And right now, I would say they're more on the walking the calm path to defeat. And right now I would say they're more on the walking the calm path to defeat but nobody is suggesting they have a way out of this bind.

And nobody believes they do have a way out of this bind. And not that many people are calling for them to do something else. And so I think you have to at some point say whatever these Democrats are saying in public they're more resigned and more willing to just be the resistance to a Trump presidency than a lot of their public facing rhetoric would suggest.

You have a calm voice, but you're skyrocketing my fucking blood pressure right now, Ezra. I'm just like so fucking mad. This is a similar point that was made. I want to shout out a seat to Duanevu over at the New Republic. This is very simple. If you genuinely believe Biden can't win this election and you're not doing anything to push a replacement, you are choosing to hand the country over to Donald Trump because you're afraid of professional fallout, period, full stop. Like that's what it comes down to, right? I am a calm person. I'm personally very frustrated, right? When I wrote this piece in February, like I'm a person who covers the White House, I'm a person who Joe Biden might've given an interview to. Like, I was torching all of that, right?

I understood that. And it's not like a brave thing. It's totally fine. I have my job. It's not a big deal. Like, I still talk to people, like, in the White House. But it is maddening to have so many people telling me privately that what I am seeing is true, and they agree, and then watch them publicly say nothing or even say the opposite

in some cases. Because to me, the whole point of this was, yes, Donald Trump is very dangerous. If you come to the view that Joe Biden cannot beat him, which is the view I came to again back in February, where my whole argument there was simply the risk of running him is too great now. He can't perform at this level and he's already behind. He's not going to be able to make it up. I think what I said proved basically true so far. like it was exactly the kind of thing i was worried about you did get weak knee to write a comeback article right after that no i i'm super pissed about this thing that people think i recanted because i don't think you're a can't that to be clear i'm just teasing you but go ahead defend yourself oh i'm gonna say i'm gonna defend myself because i said

if the joe biden who showed up at the state of the Union is a Joe Biden we see from here until the election, the pundits like me are going to look pretty, pretty bad, basically. But that wasn't what we were going to see, as I said on my podcast that very same week, that like the problem is he's got these good and bad days, and I don't know why he has which ones. Anyway, look, I think that a lot of Democrats are not acting like beating Trump is worth risking very much at all for. And if they're not acting like beating Trump is worth risking very much at all for. And if they're not acting like it is worth risking much to beat Trump, then on some level, you either have to believe they have a complete collapse in the internal consistency of their beliefs and behavior, or you have to believe

on some level that maybe it's even hard for them to admit to themselves they don't think that beating Trump is such an important thing that it's worth risking very much to do. I'm going to become a high school social studies teacher. This is enraging me so much. My next topic was going to be like, what is even the bull case for Joe Biden? Like he doesn't have a message that I can tell, like he doesn't have any strategy, any stated strategy or path, but it seems like we've covered this and you concur. He has no message or no strategy. Let me run through the theories of victory for him, right? Because I think I've talked to people

about what they are. For a very long time, their theory of victory, and this is why they scheduled the early June debate, was that the thing they need to have happen was for Donald Trump and a Donald Trump presidency to come to feel real to people. And that the moment that happened, there'd be a kind of sharpening of the electorate's sense of consequence here and a rallying around Joe Biden, right? The return of the anti-MAGA coalition. I think that theory at this point has been decisively disproven. We're not that far from an election now. We're like right on. We've hit the conventions more or less.

And people have now seen a presidential debate. And how is Donald Trump doing? He is doing better. Like he's doing better than he was before. So this idea that the American people. He's at his high watermark. Better than he's ever done. We have never seen this before.

So the idea that the American people faced with the prospect of Donald Trump are going to blanch from Trumpism is wrong, right? There is a portion, a significant portion of the electorate that will not vote for him under any circumstances, right? I'm one of those people. But it is not enough to win. So there's another view, which is that Joe Biden has actually quite good record. You always hear Democrats say this, or you hear him say it, right? Like, you know, look at the records, look at the records. And I am a big defender of Joe Biden good record. You always hear Democrats say this, or you hear him say it, right? Like, you know, look at the records, look at the records. And I am a big defender of Joe Biden's record. Same, but come on.

The problem is that it is an unpopular record and they have not been able to make it popular, right? And Ezra Klein columns in the New York Times about how good the IRA is and how good the chips and science sector are, haven't done it. And the bigger problem- Jonathan Last Triad's newsletters

and the niche Never Trump Bulwark website also haven't done it. And the bigger problem- Jonathan, last triads, newsletters, and the niche Never Trump Bulwark website also haven't done it. And the economy, which by traditional measures is quite good, is extraordinarily unpopular. And the view that people are going to come back and get used to the high prices and say, well, unemployment's very low and net-net, while inflation is eating 85% of my wage gains, I sold the 15% of wage gains. So in a real sense, I'm a little bit up from where I was. It hasn't happened. I've like done a lot of like journalism on this.

It's a little bit frustrating to me because I think the economy is underrated. But people hate the economy. And it is a very weak point for Joe Biden, not a strong point. They trust Trump way above Biden on the economy. So the idea that the Biden record and presidency are going to become popular, they've been trying to do that, and it again has failed. I think those were the two big theories. So now the theory is like they're going to spend the next however many months attacking Donald Trump. They've been spending money in swing states,

and Donald Trump is doing just fine, right? So you have to assume they're going to find some new line of attack and fund it in some new way at the very same moment that the Trump forces who have erased Joe Biden's money advantage and are now starting to hit the airwaves. There were like some theories here. And the thing is the theories haven't worked out. And I guess you could have had a fourth theory, which is that Joe Biden was going to enter campaign mode. And in campaign mode, people would see a version of him they hadn't really seen. And they would just come to like him more again. And we're seeing that in campaign mode, he can't do that, right?

Like he's not able to perform at that level. So there were theories here. I would like to hear what their next theory is. I would be very interested to hear the theory now that the Biden campaign has of how they beat Trump. But like even before the debate, their theories were not working. Now their theories are in really bad shape, and I've not heard anybody articulate an alternative case. So it'd be nice for somebody to do so. I would love to hear a strategy or plan besides attacking David Axelrod and podcast hosts. It would be nice. A clear attack line against Donald Trump would be a good first start.

My theory about why I could be wrong, like challenging my own priors on this is a depressed election, like a turnout, a very depressed turnout for this election because people are so negative on the two candidates so that the forecasters are wrong. The electorate looks more like an electorate that we've seen. And it wouldn't look completely like a midterm, but closer to a midterm than a 2020. And the kind of low info voters that Trump is overperforming with don't actually turn out. And the high info, Ezra Klein podcast listening, you know, Trump college educated former Republicans that do vote in every election do turn out. And he squeaks out a narrow 271 through either the blue wall or Arizona.

That's possible. It doesn't have a 0% chance of happening, I don't think. But that would be based on essentially total luck and just loathing of Donald Trump and apathy and mass voter apathy. Yeah, I mean, maybe I should add another theory here, right? Which is that the polls are wrong and Democrats keep outperforming in elections. And the problem is that theory is based on a lie. Well, dang, I was excited for a second. Yeah, right. You know, call this like the Simon Rosenberg theory, right? Who's sort of the hopium guy. Yeah, we've had him

on. So have I. And, you know, but the thing that Rosenberg, I think, does not admit about 2022 is that the polls were right. The thing that was unusual about the polling in 2022 was that it should not have been possible for Democrats to have the midterm they did with Biden's approval ratings where they were. And so there was a lot of expectation that like Biden's approval ratings would sink the Democrats. That didn't happen. But that is not the same thing as the polling being wrong. The polling was actually quite accurate in 2022. It was unusually accurate. It was one of the most accurate elections we have polled in a long time. That doesn't mean there was no error, but the error was very small. And by the way, to the extent there has been significant polling error in 2016 and in 2020, it has been to underestimate Donald Trump's support. And Democrats keep outperforming in elections.

Fine, you kind of make that work. But if you don't believe the polls are wrong, then you have a real problem. And the other reason to not believe the polls are wrong is that every other Democratic candidate in a significant election is polling ahead of Joe Biden. So these polls are not picking up electorates that are not willing to vote for Democrats. The Democratic Senate candidates are ahead. I'm told that Joe Biden is running well behind Democrats in House districts from people who do that kind of polling. So we are not finding an electorate that is unwilling to vote for Democrats, even though we know Democrats have been doing pretty well in 2018 and 2020 and 2022. We're finding an electorate that does not want to vote for Joe Biden. And virtually every

piece of data we have is consistent on that. Presidential approval ratings, head-to-head matchups. And the Democratic elites, which contrary to Joe Biden, the president of the United States, telling the co-hosts of Morning Joe on MSNBC that he's getting real tired of all these elites, present company accepted. The actual elites who run things in the Democratic Party have just been refusing to listen to the voters on this. The voters are saying they think Joe Biden is too old. They don't want him to run again. The Democratic Party has kind of been like, sit down and shut up. And yeah, maybe as you say, all the errors in Democrats' direction this year, but there is no reason, there is no information we have currently that points in that direction.

So, you know, it's a hell of a thing to go to war. The elites are the most sanguine about Joe Biden. Yeah. When I did my February piece, it was so fascinating because I just I was absolutely flooded with like extraordinarily positive. Everybody's like, I'm so sorry you got hammered so much. But my subjective experience of that piece was that I was so flooded with positive reaction from normie Democrats. Like, how can we make this happen? Who do I call? And then it was like, top Democratic-aligned commentators were mad at me, right? Like, Joan Walsh was mad at me. Josh Marshall, I'm talking about Samama, was mad at me, right? Yeah,, like people I would call democratic elites were mad at me, right?

This is unhelpful, right? As Gavin Newsom said after the debate, right? The panic, it may not be unwarranted, but it is unhelpful. And democratic elites were completely refusing to listen to what democratic voters are saying in polls, completely refusing to listen. To which it's like any democrat you might meet in your life has been saying, you know, that like, you know, there's a problem here. This guy does not inspire confidence. So, yeah, the sort of run against the elite strategy, while I'm not saying it can't work, operates at a kind of like a level of Orwellian irony that is, from a literary perspective, it's all very heavy-handed as satire. It is.

Okay, so I want to talk about the vice president in particular, but just at the biggest level, I'm told, again, this is, I'm an immigrant to the democratic process here. I've never worked on a democratic campaign. I'm told by people who have worked on democratic campaigns that i don't appreciate the level of shit show that it would be in the factionalization and the fighting and the identitarian arguments if if joe biden were to step aside and there were to be an open process at this late of date um i i don't i'm skeptical that it could be any worse than the current path myself, and I think potentially it could be even good and vibrant. I know that you've been talking about this a lot. What's your view?

I don't buy it at all. And it's based sort of on nothing. Angry people on Twitter, it's based on people's Twitter mentions. They're like, oh, if we did this, I would have a lot of people yelling at me. Yeah, it's first, we are watching emerging in real time a profound schism in the Democratic Party first, right? Like this is not a Democratic Party doing well, right? This is a party where people are furious at each other, where there's a huge amount, a huge amount of people, including, by the way, a plurality of Democrats in polls I'm seeing who want Joe Biden to step aside. He's not going to. Ordinary voters who are feeling gaslit, members of Congress yelling at each other. So you're watching a party at almost a maximum

level of schism at this very moment. So this idea that you're going to have factionalism, it's like, yeah, like, yeah, you might. I mean, everything I can tell is that Democrats would be sort of excited by a sort of open convention. But it's primary. The Democratic Party has been a fairly mature institution up until like kind of this moment that has been making good strategic decisions across primary campaigns, including, by the way, in 2020, when the Democratic primary electorate was not excited about Joe Biden, but voted for him anyway, because it very much wanted to beat Donald Trump. And he seemed to offer the best chance to do that. But if you just look at what has been happening in Democratic primaries, in Democratic succession campaigns, like over on the Republican side, they're like deposing speakers, you know, like, like House speakers, like it's a hobby. And, you know, everybody's terrified of a primary election. On the Democratic side,

they have completely unremarkable succession of the leadership of the House Democrats. You've had strong unity between the moderates and sort of leftists, right? That kind of squad, squad, squad factionalism that seemed like such a big deal in 2020 has abated. You're not seeing these Justice Democrats primaries succeeding anymore. The Democratic Party has been a quite united vehicle during this period. It is, of course, true that picking a candidate is tricky, but they have the uniting force of

Donald Trump to help them do it. When you are losing, you want to increase the range of outcomes. And yes, bad outcomes are possible too, but if your current outcome is very bad, and I actually think there's good reason to believe Joe Biden is polling functionally near the floor for a Democrat at the moment, that the reason things haven't moved that much is he's already polling terribly, right? Before the debate, he was polling way beneath the Democratic Senate candidates. Before the debate, around 70% of voters said he was too old to be an effective president. Before the debate, he was trailing Donald Trump, who we have never seen leading the Democrat in head-dead polls in 2020 and 2016. So before all of this,

he might have been actually quite near as bad as a Democrat can functionally get in a very polarized era. So he's fallen a little bit. That little bit is really near how bad a Democrat can get. And there's a lot of room, it seems to me, for Democrats to rise with a different candidate. I mean, there's a lot of like, I'm worried about potential bad things that might happen. And it's like, well, what about these actual terrible things that are happening? We're living bad things. And I did the thing, so it was like, what's your plan for getting rid of Biden? I'm like, I don't know. What's your plan for Biden doing better? It's like we're just screaming at each other and throwing chairs back and forth.

Okay, let's talk about the vice president. I admitted on yesterday's podcast I'm getting coconut filled a little bit. I'm very calm, a little curious. She can at least talk, which is a good step in the right direction. I'm open, though, to the idea that as a white guy, former Republican, my judgment is off on this and that maybe there is a deep well of misogyny and racism that puts a cap on her potential efforts and that there's some wise Democrats that are thinking we can't take a risk on her. And we do focus groups at the board. Can you do here some pretty astonishing

things from people when they talk about the possibility of a woman president. That really shakes you to your core when you hear people saying that and when they're in the safe space of a focus group. So I don't know. I'm of mixed views on it. I think that clearly should be better than the current path. But obviously there are risks. What say you about the vice president? Look, my view, and I just did a big show on this with Elena Palavra, who did a great Atlantic piece on her.

My view is Harris is underrated, but I don't know how underrated. And there's no way to find out outside of some kind of contest, which is why I'm a very big proponent of, you know, Jim Clyburn called it a mini primary. People have called it a blitz primary. I've talked about open conventions, you know, Jim Clyburn called it a mini primary. People have called it a blitz primary. I've talked about open conventions, you know, that have a process like

this, but. The James Carville plan to have a traveling roadshow with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Yeah. I thought the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama part of that was weird, but otherwise a traveling roadshow is fine with me. You know, have debates, have town halls, have them in interviews, see what happens. You know, if you say that conventional wisdom on Harris is that her political skills are a five, and I'm just saying this completely for the sake of argument, I'm not saying that's what it is. You know, if they're really a six, she's underrated. If they're really a nine, she's underrated. But those are two very different forms of being underrated. And so we need to see, you know,

my view of what has happened with Harris is that Harris comes into politics, international politics with a very clear profile. She's a smart on crime, moderate black Democrat. That is her profile in California. She runs in 2020 at a time when a smart on crime, moderate black Democrat with a record as a prosecutor is like not what anybody is looking for. And the mood in the party is swung not towards Democrats who can prove that they are tough but thoughtful about crime to criminal justice reform outright. And I think there are good substantive reasons that people are upset about the criminal justice system. I am one of those

people. Basically, Harris, who is a quite cautious politician, abandons her old, not just her old political identity, but the identity that has been her only political identity. And I would say the sort of underperformance of her 2020 campaign reflects a number of things, but mainly reflects that she wasn't able to figure out something else, right? There wasn't a new Kamala Harris idea for her to step into. They never figured out who should she be if she wasn't the person she had always been. People wanted her to step into. They never figured out who should she be if she wasn't the person she had always been. People wanted her to succeed. They wanted the Kamala Harris thing to work. But Kamala Harris wasn't just like a bundle of Black, Indian American-

Yeah, identities and policies. Kamala Harris meant something. And when she was emptied of that meaning or ran away from that meaning, she wasn't able to find another meaning. But she still performed on a communications level fairly well during the campaign, which I think people sort you know, it's a post-George Floyd moment. She was strong in different ways. And I think the political theory of the Democratic Party, when he would talk about being a bridge, was that the future of the Democratic Party was very multi-ethnic, right? Like, I think in 2020, the view was Democrats are not going to have a white guy nominee again for a long time. And then there is a sort of backlash to this political theory. And I think part of why opinions swing on Harris so much is that people actually come to see Biden as a stronger candidate than her, right? And think this sort of politics democratic party became too focused on this sort of multi-ethnic identity politics coalition idea. And meanwhile, here's Donald Trump running in a way that is often

blatantly racist, blatantly xenophobic, and he's picking up Black and Hispanic voters. So like, how come if this was such a good theory, Democrats are actually losing the very voters that this theory was supposed to pick up. So the sort of theory behind Harris begins to crumble. And it's just very hard to have your own political identity as a VP, right? So she's lost a political identity as she runs in 2020, and then becomes VP, where she has to have Joe Biden's political identity, even though she's a quite different politician. So we don't know who the Harris of a 2024 campaign would be. And so we would need to see and find that out. I think it could be strong. I think

she's a good communicator. I think she's a smart person. I've been around her. She's much more magnetic and charismatic in person than I think people realize. But the thing that the Democratic Party has been denying itself with Joe Biden and his campaign from a bubble is information. It didn't have enough information on how he would perform in a campaign. And so the first time it got real information, which is the debate, it was like, oh no. It can't make that mistake twice. It needs to find things out about the people it might nominate before it nominates them. This Cook Political Report has a private set of surveys where Trump expanded his lead in Pennsylvania over Biden from four points to 10. It'd be landslide Trump territory. So with that, a couple little parlor games for you. So let's say that Ezra Klein is incorrect and that the logistical challenge or the will

to actually have an open process in a blitz primary just is not there. And you have to put all your chips on the vice president or the president. Who would you rather ride with right now? Harris. Not even close. You know, the misogyny element doesn't worry about you? The woman? Put aside the sort of slight unknowability of the election itself, right? Harris polls almost exactly like Joe Biden lately has been polling a little bit ahead. Harris could pick a vice president who could allay some weaknesses.

I believe that the responsible thing is to nominate someone who you think has the capacity to serve for another four years. And I don't think given the reporting we're seeing of deterioration in Biden, I just feel comfortable with that. And it's not a knock on Biden. It's not his fault that he is aging. It might be a knock on him if he stubbornly refuses to accept it. Yes, I mean, that is true. The knock on him is that he refuses to accept it. But people keep being mad at people

like me, you know, for this position we're putting everybody in, like talking about Biden's faculties. But Biden's putting us in this position. Like I didn't choose for him to run again at 81. And to the extent he is, like that was a high risk gamble. The gamble isn't paying off. He's got to recognize that and stuff. I would like to see him set up a side. Anyway, Harris, I think, just from a fundamental level of fitness, I just feel more comfortable with. And I think it is the job of political parties to nominate people who are widely believed to be fit, like physically fit for the presidency. One more parlor game. My colleague Sarah Longwell put it this way on our podcast this week. And she said to me, if you're going to die, like if you're literally going to die, if Donald Trump won, who would you want to ride with? And

shouldn't the Democrats be thinking about this like that? And let's put aside all those annoying Democrats you talked about from earlier in the podcast, you think Donald Trump's just some normal Republican like Mitt Romney, and it's no big deal. Like, let's say we really take seriously that it is life or death from the republic. What would you do if you were the Democrats in that case? Open process? I would have a blitz primary. I don't think this is a hard call. I've been talking to pollsters about it too. I'm sorry. In February, I think there are a lot of good reasons I could have been wrong. At this point, to run Joe Biden is to accept such an unacceptable level of risk in the capacity of

the guy running for president, the capacity of the guy being president. That's just not a close call. We've nominated, I mean, nominating candidates through conventions is how we did it for most of American history. Some version of that is how most countries that are democracies do it. This is not an unknown thing. The that is how most countries and our democracies do it. This is not an unknown thing. Like the Democratic Party to me has a lot of talent in it. I don't think we are now at a point where this is like a hard call.

Now, obviously the problem is like, if you can't get him to step aside, there's not a lot that can be done. But in terms of what the party should do, it should do everything it can to try to make him step aside, to convince him to step aside. And then it should run a truncated process that is nevertheless highly visible in public to figure out who its strongest ticket would be. And by the way, to squeeze Donald Trump the fuck out of the news cycle for a couple months.

Can you imagine the fury of Donald Trump if he is sitting there unable to break into a news cycle through July and August, because all the attention is on this completely unknown political thing happening, where the Democrats have like, sent their eight top next generation people into the field to give constant town halls and interviews and be on shows and podcasts and, you know, newspaper columns and like, you know, YouTube things, all the things you can't have Biden do right now. All of them very diligently with alacrity, making the case against Project 2025 and all of Trump's vulnerabilities

and how those clips are out everywhere. Anyway, it's kind of related to the topic of your book, While We're Polarized. People have been joking about the blue anon, the blue MAGA element online. But I think there's been been interesting little sociological study over the past few weeks and i'm thinking in particular about threads did you join threads i did join threads yeah i had to delete threats so i in my view anything that is an epistemically closed

system where people are only getting information from people that agree with them is eventually corrupting and radicalizing no matter how well-intentioned all the people are. And I have seen just kind of insane behavior from people that I think are well-intentioned people and good people at the, at heart on the left, particularly on threads. And, and you've seen all these other things sprouting up.

Like there's been this mini like Fox to Newsmax thing where people are like, I'm turning off MSNBC and Ezra Klein. And I'm only going to watch, I don't want to make fun of anybody, but I'm only going to watch this one YouTube show where they tell me what I want to hear. So anyway, I just thought given that you'd written the book on that, you might have some interesting thoughts on the topic of information siloing. Yeah, I do think the threads observation is real. Look, I have been off most social media for years now. And my observation about most of it, even though I do have to read stuff on it

to keep up with my job, is that it makes people into worse and dumber versions of themselves. And that particularly if you're in my job or your job, that actually maintaining some independence of thought is just, it's so fucking crucial. And it is so hard if you're absorbing that much input and that much input that is deeply non-representative.

I mean, again, for all that, like a lot of people on, you know, I guess we're on threads or finding, you know, this like fury.

It's like, how dare the New York times report on the biggest story in American politics in years. There is never the less, you look at the polls and like, again, like a plurality of Democrats do not want this guy to run. Like, you know, in 2023, and I was writing about this, like a majority of Democrats often didn't want Joe Biden to run again. So it's not even like this is somehow representing Democrats. Like, but yes, the sort of epistemic narrowness of these high engagement silos, like blue sky, I'm not on, but my understanding is it's even worse in this way.

It's a real problem. And it affects the behavior of people with power in politics. And because it affects their behavior, because it affects what they see in the world and their sense of feedback and consequences, I think that the way social media polarizes politics is by polarizing political elites. And I think you're probably seeing some of that happen right now, too. Ezra Klein, I'm getting what the hype is all about about you. Interesting. I hear you ask people for book recommendations at the end of your podcast. So my final question for you is, I want you to distract me.

I want my brain to go far away from here. I want to go to the beach. Health and Wellness by Emily Witt. Health and Wellness by Emily Witt. It is the most astonishing memoir about raving and drug culture. Like I did not know anybody could write about this this way ever.

Now there's a darker turn it takes at some point. Don't ruin it for me. This is my escape. I'm not going to ruin anything. Friends sent it to me at galleys and it like, I just could not stop reading it. And so, yeah,

if you want to end up somewhere completely different health and wellness, a breakdown, I think it's called by Emily Witt. I look forward to reading that. Thank you so much for coming on the Borg Podcast tomorrow. Your colleague, David French, all New York Times all the time here, and we'll see you all then. Peace. Baby, you're my baby, say it to me Baby, my baby, tell your baby that I'm your baby I'm good on losing dogs

I know they're losing and I pay for my place By the ring where I'll be looking In their eyes when they're down I'll be there on their side I'm losing by their side I'm missing by their side