The Dispatch Podcast - Dishonest, Partisan, or Just Bad at Their Job? | Roundtable

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

In a special Independence Day episode, Sarah, Jonah, and Steve share their Fourth of July traditions and try to figure out how Democrats can get out of this mess. The Agenda: —Calvin Coolidge’s Declaration of Independence speech —Centuries-old cherries found at Mt. Vernon —Why won’t Joe Biden leave the race? —Biden’s statement on the SCOTUS immunity ruling —What would Sarah do? —Harris has a problem —Did the media cover Biden’s age well? —What does all this mean for Trump’s VP pick? Show Notes: —A celebration of a free press —Jonah’s G-File on parties —Jake Tapper and Sen. Chris Coons —Steve on Tim Miller’s podcast —Matthew Dowd’s tweet  —Hadas Gold’s piece on White House reporters —New York Times editorial on Biden The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut and citizen of planet Earth. Join me on a journey into the systems that power the world. No politics, just real conversations with real people shaping the future of energy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website. To provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs,

No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the bad. Yes, there was a slow start,

but it was a strong finish. And as I say, we've got to have the back of this president. You don't turn your back because of one performance. Their bad debates happen. It's a problem. It's a bad night. The president had. had a difficult night, just like every single one of us do.

It was preparation overload. The choice is one terribly bad night versus a decade of destruction. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger that's Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. And we're doing a special limited 4th of July edition of the podcast. Let's start with something really important. Steve and Jonah, what are your 4th of July traditions and recommendations for people you know, what they should be reading aloud to their family eating, whatever.

Okay, so traditions, I used to, for the longest time, when my mom was still alive, we would go to her place in Weehawken because it has the best view of the fireworks on the Hudson imaginable. Did you do dual re-enactments? A little bit, you know, we talk about it. And then the problem is Bill de Blasio because he's a Brooklyn jingoist. He moved it to the East River, and that kind of ruined that for a while. I live in a neighborhood where the MacArthur Boulevard for the July parade is awesome.

So we often go to that. If I was going to say one thing that people should read, it is Calvin Coolidge's 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence speech, which I think is arguably, other than Martin Luther King's, I have a dream speech, and the Gettysburg Address, it is the third best state. about the Declaration of Independence ever uttered in American lore. I have not read that. I'm so excited. That's what I'm going to do. Fantastic. Maybe that's what we should send tomorrow

in the morning dispatch. I am, our tradition had been until Charles Crowthammer's passing. We went several times to his Fourth of July party up on the Magothy River near Baltimore.

Name dropper. And, well, you asked what we did. That's what we did. Now let me drop some names. There were all sorts of people who attended these parties, including Clarence Thomas and others. And Charles handed out laminated copies of the Declaration of Independence. We would stand in a circle and read the declaration aloud. And it was, I mean, awesome in the original meaning of the word.

Awesome. And, you know, you got chills. My kids were there for that, loved that. And I missed the tradition. I certainly miss Charles. We are going, I think, to Mount Vernon tomorrow, where they also have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, 9.30 in the morning.

And then we're going to spend the day at Mount Vernon, and I think we're going to go get some frozen custard afterwards. Did you hear that they just found preserved cherries. I did. I read that. I read that. Yeah. But you know, they never answered my question. Did anyone try one? It was weird. The new segment I saw on it just sort of skit, they said, oh, they're so perfectly preserved, and they're in great shape, and you can see them. How did they not think that's the

question we all had? Yeah. I mean, just edible versus inedible would be like good to know, you know. It's a good question. And then in terms of what to read, I would say, read Jonah's G-File and Jeffrey Toobin. Don't go back and read that. I was just to say we can think of it as a celebration of a free press. No, don't. Don't go back and read that. I actually think, sort of let's be simple and straightforward here,

go back and read the Declaration. Too many people, I think, don't do that. It's very worth doing. So that's what we're doing. Do you know, I was just reading it the other day because I was trying to remember one of the grievances. And then I just went, you know, once you get into the grievances,

you have to read them all because they're delightful and the order in which they're in is bewildering at times. There's like, he made us sit in uncomfortable chairs and places we didn't want to have to sit. And then like two thirds of the way down, it's he's a tyrant who kills people. And you're like, that feels like an odd order.

But yeah, it's a fun document because it moves in between the high-minded and the very specific. And the sometimes crotchety, and whiny, and I like all of that. All right. It has been a week in the news and in our politics, and it feels somehow fitting that it's July 4th,

sort of like in the movie Independence Day, where everything is destroyed all around, and the president says, you know, we will now declare our new independence, not as a nation, but as a world. I'm paraphrasing Bill Pullman here, but you get the point. It feels very much like we're living in a moment of history that we have not really lived in at all since LBJ announced that he was not going to neither seek nor accept the Democratic nomination.

In the moment that we're recording this, of course, Joe Biden has said that no one is going to pressure him out of this race. But Jonah, Steve, both of you have noted that is both what he has to say. if he's not leaving, and what he has to say if he is leaving the race. So can you just give us sort of your larger historical perspective on what we're experiencing right now, maybe even why this hasn't happened before, Jonah? Well, I mean, one of the reasons this hasn't happened before is for whatever reasons we haven't had candidates this old. You know, we don't have to get all depressing about how much older.

people our ages looked 40 years ago, but like people are aging better. I think the system is producing these oldsters in part because of the dysfunction of the system. The power of incumbency and all of that is keeping these people in power way longer than they should be. Surely the death of the political parties is also part of this. For sure. Extreme weakness of the political parties. This isn't who a robust political party would have picked two years ago to begin with. For sure. Actually, I just wrote a G-file about that. that. I don't know. I mean, I don't think there are a lot of historical parallels in part because in the past, the parties were strong enough and self-disciplined enough to catch these problems

earlier. In the era prior to, certainly era prior to the TV, Donald Trump never would have been a nominee. Joe Biden would have been told, okay, thank you for your service. Here's your gold watch. but the parties don't have the ability anymore to impose a kind of discipline on themselves. So I think I think that's part of it. And I think if we're going to write the history about all this, you'd also have to look at the fact that both parties, because they don't pursue strategies of trying to appeal to a large majority,

like a 60% in a majority, they keep trying to squeak one out with 50.1 or something like that by turning up the base. the kinds of politicians who have brought appeal have been eliminated right Barack Obama through Obamacare by doing a base only Democrat only push for Obamacare and all that kind of stuff

killed all of the moderate Democrats in the South and the Midwest and made the party intensely bluer Donald Trump has made the Republican Party intensely redder and so you don't have some sort of elder statesman types who you can call off the bench to step in and you don't have elder and you don't have elder statesman types who can come in and talk people out of making these kinds of bad decisions. So, I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons,

but those are the ones that come to my mind. I agree with that. Yeah, no, just pick up on Jonah's last point. I mean, when you look at the practical reasons that Joe Biden seems, at least at this moment, intent on sticking this out, part of it has to do with the fact that the parties, there are very few mechanisms the parties can use at this point. there are very few people in the parties who there aren't there aren't any statesmen

elder than Joe Biden right right I'm just saying just literally or figuratively yeah one quick point the irony of the why he got elected in the first place was because people thought of him as that kind of elder statesman kind of guy correct correct so we were talking about this I was talking with with a group of really smart Washington DC political observers yesterday and and you know we said, so who would it be? Who's going to make this argument? And who's going to make an argument to Joe Biden that Joe Biden would listen to? And part of this is, I think, unique to Joe Biden, you know, beyond his sort of neurodegenerative condition and mental acuity problems. He is a particularly prideful and stubborn individual. This has been true for his entire. career. He's had a chip on his shoulder. He thinks of himself as Grant and Joe. You could see it in the early parts of his career when he would, you know, there's that famous exchange. It was caught on video where he lambasts a voter who comes to talk to him and, you know, claims to have graduated at the

top of his law school class and make all these claims. I mean, he's always been proving himself to people he imagines are his betters. And so the kind of natural people that you would expect in a moment like this to be able to prevail on Biden to do something, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and others not only wouldn't necessarily have that effect, but could push him in the other direction because he's such a prideful individual. And I think, you know, on the one hand, I've heard that now from several Democrats. And on the one hand, it's sort of hard to imagine. Like, really, if the two former living Democratic presidents came to you, you wouldn't stop and and reconsider your obstinacy in this moment, if that's part of what's driving this.

When I push back in conversations with those Democrats, they say, yeah, that's who Joe Biden is. And I think they're probably right. So I think that's, that explains, that's, that's the other explanation here is Biden is just so incredibly obstinate. There aren't people, we talked about a group of, you know, he reveres the Senate. He talks in reverential terms about the Senate when he gave the eulogy for John McCain at John McCain's memorial, talked about selfless service, and he said, basically, I preferred working in the Senate to being vice president of the United States, even though he had legislative

responsibilities as vice president. And I think he meant that when he said it. But who among the senators today who served with him could go to Joe Biden and make this kind of a case? I do think we're likely to see people try, and we're likely to hear about it soon. But in terms of somebody who could actually persuade him or the person who would be sort of the final word to get him to drop. It's a bit of a mystery. Let's talk politics here, just the choices that those party elders, for instance, face themselves of whether they do make a private call to him or publicly start pressuring him. The choices at this point are Joe Biden, who, you know, this idea that there's going to be some sort of rehabilitation exercise, I think, is a bit fanciful. Even if he crushes

the interview with George Stephanopoulos, then the interview doesn't matter. And same with the press conference, right? When he does well, it won't matter. It's when he does poorly that it'll matter. And that will continue to happen from time to time regardless. So you're right. And can I just inject real quick there? The fact that the interview with George Stephanopoulos will be taking place, I believe it's taking place on Friday. Correct. And will air Sunday. The fact that it's being recorded eight days on and later 10 days after like that's not how you handle the kind of disaster that we saw at the debate i mean you're a comms person sarah the statement after the supreme court decision they put him out there on a teleprompter for three minutes didn't take questions

malpractice not not what you would do i mean there's a playbook maybe sarah would be worth dwelling for just a moment on what you would do had you been in a position to to advise somebody you'd had that kind of catastrophic moment to try to restore faith or reassure people. This is a person who can do the job. What does that look like? I mean, what would you have the principle do there? Wait, are we assuming for the purposes of this hypothetical that Biden can do the things? That's the problem.

Yes. No. That's the point. Okay. I thought it was worth clarifying that. I can tell you what I would do if Carly Fiorina had a debate performance like that because it's Carly Fiorina. So it would actually have been one bad night. Right. I will tell you a little bit about what I would have done with a Biden-like candidate. You'll notice, by the way, the types of candidates that I

generally worked for, John Corny, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mitt Romney, they all have some things in common and they're not having Joe Biden nights, which is why John Corny is probably the only one of the candidates I've worked for that's ever won. Sad. Anyway, so the first thing I would have done is actually the stuff he is doing now, nearly a week later, the first thing you do is get on the phone and shore up your people. You call Obama and Clinton, you call Schumer, you call, like, sort of that core team, the people who, if they went out publicly and weren't totally sure and confident, would be the most damaging to you. He appears to be making those calls today. That's an odd choice. Amazing. Amazing. And by the way, like, to give it.

an example. I actually have been in that position, you know, when the president was first tweeting that he was going to fire Jeff Sessions, for instance, we didn't wait a week within an hour on the phone working senators to go out and say publicly that they wouldn't confirm a new attorney general. That didn't happen by accident. So you work your allies first. Get them on board, figure out the strategy that they're comfortable with and that works. That's step number one. then you start working on the public strategy at large and I got to say I think doing teleprompter speeches without taking questions is worse than doing nothing at all for them at this point you know I think I would tell my boss and this again is why I was not the most popular comms person

in the Republican Party you take the questions you give it without a teleprompter if you fall on your face better to know now fine you leave the race but if you don't then it proves that it really was a bad night. And, you know, having a debate at 9 p.m. sucks. Who wants to stay up that late? I barely wanted to stay up that late to watch it. But the worst thing you can do is continue to be afraid for your principal because there's going to be bad night.

So this gets to my question. Which is politically better for the Democratic Party in terms of their chances of beating Donald Trump and, and this may be a different question, the down-ballot races? one, sticking with a Joe Biden who I think we know the limitations they are going to have on pushing back on this narrative, as they said, like the good things aren't going to count

and the bad things are going to count triple. Or he says he's not going to accept the Democratic nomination and it goes to Harris as the Democratic nominee sitting vice president or door number three he steps down as president allows Harris to be the

incumbent, be president for a few months in advance of the November election. If those were your three options and you were these senior Democrats sort of mulling amongst each other, whether you're a Democratic governor, these, you know, grand poobas out there, et cetera, how would you be thinking about those three options? So can I ask a question? Are we just ruling out the possibility of option number four? Yeah, I think option number four is the right option. Which is either to convince Kamala Harris to take one for the team and take herself out of consideration as well and then become a kingmaker

and have an open floor convention thing where Newsom and Josh Shapiro and a bunch of other people can run? Or do we just think that's so unlikely? Yeah, I'm taking that out. You don't get to pick that door. Okay. I'm picking it. No, Steve. No, you're not. I'll tell me why. That's not a door. It's a wall.

That's right. This is sort of like the, oh, Michelle Obama. Like, nope, if you actually play out how you get to something like that, I think it's really impossible to move to that world. I think it is not possible to move to a world without either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as the nominee at this point. Because of the political damage it would cause to not have Harris, even if she quote unquote voluntarily removed herself, nobody would think that it was voluntary and they would see it as an insult and a slate. Okay, so I got to disagree with that too

But I think you're absolutely right It is impossible without her cooperation If she wants it Impossible in terms of the money too Yeah, it's just impossible And that argument wins, I think Money can be used in other ways Okay, shut up and listen

But she's got to cooperate And you've got to be convinced to cooperate, I think If she goes out there and says All she does to do is say once This thing is being stolen from the vice president and the first African-American, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it is, and this is going to be in Chicago. The whole thing just becomes the fight scene from Anchorman.

If she cooperated, I'm more inclined towards the order number four. I think it is impossible to stick with Biden on the ticket between now and November, simply because he can't, put it this way. I'm not a fan of come out, Kamala Harris. I don't think she'd be a good nominee. I don't think she'd be a good president. I don't think she was a good choice for vice president. I think she would be bad in interviews and all that kind of stuff.

But she can actually run for president. She can do the interviews. She can give speeches. She could debate Trump. I think she could probably beat Trump in a debate. People will actually listen to what she's saying versus worrying about whether her, you know, the left side of her face is drooping. And plus, can you imagine?

I think, you know, someone that's pointed out to me on Twitter when I said, Look, all these other potential candidates, they're polling right now, which is statistically tied with Biden, or at least it was yesterday. And people are saying, see, they don't do any better than Biden does. They're not the President of the United States. They don't have the name ID, right? They're not actually running. They haven't been picked. It seems kind of obvious to me that, again, candidate depending, almost anybody on those lists would get a five to ten point bump the moment it was announced that they're the Democratic nominee.

A lot of people in the Biden coalition would come home. I think it would be a lot like, remember when Mel Carnahan died in that plane crash? And all of a sudden, his wife just got this incredible bump by taking the nomination for Senate away and started to perform better than Carnahan was performing. I think there were... This is how John Ashcroft becomes Attorney General. That's right. That's right. And that's how Sarah Isgir met my wife.

That's right. Because they both worked for the DOJ. But anyway, I think Biden can't do it because he can't run. I mean, literally, like, what we think of is running for president means doing unscripted events, giving lots of interviews, doing debates. He cannot do those things. Also, if we think the decline has been precipitous, you know, I mentioned this interview that I saw from nine months ago.

It looks very different than what we saw at that debate, which tells you sort of how quickly this is moving, whatever it may be. There's four months. I mean, it's actually a very long time left at this. point. Yeah. So I personally think you don't put, you don't have Biden resign from the presidency. You say, hey, look, the demands of campaigning are such that I cannot for the good of my party do this, but I can still do the job. And that gives, lets him save face in all sorts of ways. It gets him to cooperate with this plan to begin with, whether you still think is a hurdle. And what you want to do is,

there's a great scene in the movie Wag the Dog, where Robert De Niro is explaining that you can't bring the fake hostage home until after the election, because the election is the movie ticket to see the ending that you want, right? And so you want to galvanize your voters to say she could be the first female, first African-American, female African-American president in the United States.

If she's already that, it takes some of the fun out of, and some of the incentive structure for a lot of those African-American voters, a lot of those women voters away. And so having her run as vice president, I think makes just strategically more sense if I can't pick door number four. Steve, you can't pick door number four because obviously everyone would pick door number four. That's not reasonable. But if everybody would pick door number four, that includes a lot of Democrats and there are going to be a lot of Democrats who are making this decision.

So they may push people to door number four. You don't get to pick door number four. I'm creating door number five then. So Joe Biden cannot stay. And I think the reasons that he cannot stay are. obvious beyond what Jonah has said before, you have to imagine that if you're a Democratic elected official right now, whether you're in a competitive race or not, but particularly if you're in a competitive race, you're watching people like Chris Coons, who's one of, I think, one of Biden's six

campaign co-chairs, one of his best friends, go out and try to make the case that this person who we've all seen have this massive glitch. And that's part of a long pattern of difficulties Joe Biden has had. Try to make the case that that's the person who should be president. It doesn't work. You saw Jay Johnson, Obama's former Secretary of Homeland Security, tried to do it yesterday on Morning Joe. That didn't work.

And then this afternoon, we're recording this Wednesday afternoon, Corrine Jean-Pierre, the White House spokeswoman, went out and gave literally one of the worst White House press briefings I have ever seen because there's no argument for her to make. So she got to the point in answering questions. from these reporters where she claimed that the reason, this is a week after, this six days after this debacle, she claimed that the reason Joe Biden struggled

was because of jet lag and a cold. That's what she said, and she said it multiple times. So we know she meant it. So jet lag, I believe he had returned from his overseas trips between 12 and 13 days before this happened. So it's not jet lag. That's absurd. It's preposterous. And the cold claim, as I think we've mentioned here before, and she acknowledged, by the way, that she was one of the sources who told reporters during the debate, yeah, the problem is the guy has a cold. So they want us to believe that the cold was so bad, so debilitating that it ruined his debate performance, but not so bad that he couldn't spend the two hours after the debate shaking hands with well-wishers, both at a debate. bait watch party that he went to. And according to Kelly O'Donnell at NBC News, he quote unquote worked the rope line. Getting all of them sick. By definition, he's shaking everybody's

hands. And then he goes to the Waffle House to buy food for the staff and daps up everybody in the Waffle House. I mean, like, come on. It's just not serious. So if you're a Democratic elected official, you're watching people try to defend Joe Biden. And that's the best they can do. You do not want to be that person and you do not want to put yourself in that position. So I do not think he can possibly stay because Democrats will increasingly look to themselves as having to do what those people are doing. So I do want to say one thing about Coons. I've, I've gone into a bit of a shot in Freud spiral watching Coons carry water for Trump, for Biden and try to do this stuff. And what's interesting, we've all said, we've talked about this a lot in

internally about how if the plan was to get rid of Biden this week would still look very much like it's looked because you have to sort of say we're behind him, we're not forcing him out because you've got to give him the room to make it seem like he's doing a selfless act and not being chased out of Washington because he's a stubborn, intellectually insecure old man. But even Coons says, and Nancy Pelosi and all of these people say over and over and over, even Mika Brzynski say over and over again, what he has to do to fix this is give lots of unscripted interviews, town halls.

He needs to get out in front of the American people and show that he's up for the job. I don't think they're saying that as a matter of sort of just blanket punditry and advice. I think it is a subtle way of signaling to Biden to say, hey, look, your biggest supporters say this is what you need to. do. And if you don't think you can do this de minimis stuff, this sort of politics one-on-one stuff

for anybody running for any office, never mind the president of the United States to reassure voters, then you've got to make this call and get out. Because like if you were really 100% behind Biden, that wouldn't be your talking point. Your talking point would be, look, he can do the job from the White House. He doesn't need to be out there. He's not a spring chicken, but that stuff doesn't matter. They're saying it matters intensely. and enormously. And I think that that's, it's sort of like saying, Jonah, you can't be the editor-in-chief of the dispatch anymore

if you can't dunk a basketball. We're totally behind you. But if you can't dunk a basketball, right? It's like, you know I can't dunk a basketball. So you're sort of setting that up implicit in the standard. I think that's more true of somebody like Chris Coons than it is of Mika Brzyns who seems to just be really siloed. But to finish my point, I will go along with at least part of what you're asking,

Sarah. I think you're probably right, both of you are probably right, that the most likely thing if Joe Biden does not remain the Democratic presumptive nominee is that Kamala Harris will get it for all the reasons that you've suggested. I certainly don't think that's the best outcome. And I think if you take Democrats at face value, and there are reasons to be skeptical that they really mean this. But if you believe that Democrats as a class, as a party, truly believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the republic, it's imperative to prevent that. So you should do whatever you need to do to prevent that outcome. And that does not mean running the person who is supposedly in line or, you know, because you might piss off one political group or another.

It means run a ticket that can win. And I think that's an argument Democrats internally can make to one another to say, look, Kamala Harris's polling numbers are not much better than Joe Biden. And while it's true that she can complete a sentence in a way that he can't, often completes a sentence and then goes on these meandering things that are easily mocked. She's not likable. She was a disastrous candidate in the Democratic primaries. There's no reason that we should settle for her when we could pick a dream team of

Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock or put Andy Bashir on a ticket. And I think that would be very appealing to a lot of people. I'm not a Democrat and I don't think like a Democrat. So there are all sorts of reasons. I mean, I have lots of blind spots in this. But it seems to me that if you truly believe that Trump is. an existential threat. And I think they're right to say it. I think we've seen that sometimes they act on that. Sometimes they don't. That's the way that you say, look, we are going to create this

other option door number four or five or 50 or whatever it is. As Norm Ornstein has pointed out, if Biden resigns, there is no vice president, no easy path to get one confirmed either. So Mike Johnson would be the next in line under the rules of succession. Look. This week on West Wing. Yeah, exactly. There's no world in which Biden actually resigns the presidency, even if it would help Harris to be the incumbent, which I think it would. And Steve, this maybe gets to your point. A lot of these options would actually increase the chances of Democrats to win in November. Yes, door number four with different candidates obviously increases their chances in November.

Not going to happen. Biden resigning the presidency to let Harris be president and let people will sort of get used to that, I think increases their chances, despite Jonah's very excellent wag the dog point, it's not going to happen because Joe Biden's never going to acknowledge that he wasn't up to the job. And I think they have a pretty good argument that if he were to acknowledge that he wasn't up to the job, it's not like he just became not up to the job today or whatever day he resigns. There would then be all these recriminations of how long was he basically not acting as president. How long did Harris know he couldn't really act as president? Who was the acting president during those times, that would hurt the Democratic Party as well.

I think that's a problem for Harris, by the way. Oh, she's got lots of problems. Like, if you think that door number four is not an option, like one of the strongest arguments against Kamala Harris is she was, in theory, working alongside Joe Biden for all this time and didn't say anything, you know, didn't raise these alarms. I think that's a, I think that would be a really difficult point for her to argue against. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a. sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the

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And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellas lenses at your child's next visit. Can we take a moment on the media question? Because this is a, you know, conversation we've been having internally. Is it the case that reporters, I'll give you more doors? One, reporters were covering this the whole time. So I don't know what you're talking about. Two, reporters were trying to shill for Joe Biden. They knew how infirm he was and didn't tell the American people. They've been lying. And door number three is they, you know, Republicans were the one saying that Joe Biden was the problem, you know, had a problem. And this is a different type of bias because of who the messenger was. They didn't believe the

message. They didn't look into the message. They weren't curious about it. And so they didn't know that Joe Biden was like this until they saw the debate. But they also didn't check. And how much do you think this will undermine credibility of the media moving forward as we put it up against things like the origins of COVID or the Hunter Biden laptop, other stories in which it's not that I think reporters knew where COVID originated. Of course, they didn't and still don't, or that they knew the laptop was real. It's that the people saying that those things were people they don't like to associate themselves with or justify. And therefore, they didn't look too hard into it. And I'll read this one line from a CNN story that I just thought was pretty egregious.

I mean, this is CNN's own reporting on why they didn't cover the story more. Like all presidents, Biden has good days and bad days. It can be tricky to report on something as difficult to define as a person aging when his opponent is a convicted felon who regularly lies and has threatened to use the government to go after his political opponents. Why would it be more difficult to report on someone's aging because of who they're running against. It's totally irrelevant to getting the story, except if you think you don't want that story out there because it could help his opponent,

in which case we get into this sort of activism, journalism problem. And I know, Steve, you think about this so much and so often. Way too much. Which one do you think is more accurate in terms of, you know, what reporters knew and when they knew it? Yeah, so I think it's somewhere in the middle. I don't think either side. I mean, this is sort of goes back to Jonah's rejection of monocausal explanations for everything.

I think there are multiple causes. If you look at what reporters did to cover Biden's age question, some reporters covered it, right? We've mentioned here two years ago, Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns wrote this book in which they covered it. They came on the dispatch podcast, talked about it at length. Alec Burns said, this is in April or May of, I think it was in May of 2022, said this is a massive concern for Democrats, right? hit Biden's age and mental acuity problems, massive concern for Democrats, he said that two years ago. So there was some reporting on it. The Wall Street Journal has done reporting on it. The New York Times has done some reporting on it. The problem is, I think, the reporting hasn't

been as vigorous as it could have been. And it was often sort of counterbalanced by skepticism, exactly along the lines of what you say, Sarah, where, you know, Republicans were making this a big deal and the Trump world was doing this. Fox News was, of course, obsessed with the Biden age question. And there's this, there's this instinct, I think, from most Republicans because they're on the left to be defensive about that. Most, yes, sorry, most reporters to be defensive about that. And I think, I think we saw evidence of that. But there is also, I mean, this was, you know, I did this podcast with Tim Miller at the bulwark after we wrote our editorial in March, in which we argued in effect, Donald Trump is a manifestly unfit to be president.

in the United States. He's a unique threat to the republic. But Joe Biden isn't the answer. And we took some grief. And we said Joe Biden, his biggest mistake as president, has been not stepping aside to let somebody else do the job because it was pretty clear that he can't do the job. We get policy differences with him. We listed those policy differences. But the big problem was he was showing obvious signs of mental challenges, cognitive challenges. And Tim's counter argument to me was, hey, no, that doesn't, you know, you sort of need to either be for Biden or you need to be for Trump. And if you're not for Trump, you have to get behind Joe Biden. And we had this big discussion. It was a very interesting discussion. And I hope I'm characterizing Tim's

view correctly, where he said in effect, like, you've got to sort of be on a team or not be on a team. And, you know, we talked about some of the ways that people who are pro-Trump might approach these questions exactly along the lines of what you just read from the CNN report. And Tim conceded, yeah, does that mean sometimes that they would have to gild the lily? I think that was his exact phrase. And he said, yes. And I just said, look, my view on this is totally different. And it's very close to what you articulated, Sarah.

You got to go and tell the story. You got to chase the story. You got to find out what's true. And then you got to report it. And I think part of what we saw from reporters is there was. was this sense that he was having these problems. You know, it wasn't all hidden. You know, the White House, I think, went to great lengths to keep this from reporters as much as they could. Even, I mean, there are, I've talked to people at major networks, newspapers who've told me

stories about the White House calling them and berating them for even raising the questions about this. This was an active campaign by the Biden team to shame reporters not. to cover this thing. But even if you allow for that, there was just this lack of sort of vigorous follow-up about the stuff that we were seeing in public, you know, the reading the teleprompter cues and things like that. Matthew Dowd, who's a longtime pun,

it used to be a Republican strategist and now is basically Democrat and advises Democrats. He raised this in a series of tweets and actually went after analysts who would basically tell the truth and said, in effect, you shouldn't be telling the truth. He tweeted, I would ask pundits who are anti-Trump, how do they think they are helping defeat Trump by constantly undermining only current opposition to beat him? Also, do you think the president or White House is going to be influenced by your calls for him to step down? Then he followed that up by saying, just because you believe something to be true, it doesn't mean you

have to say it if it isn't helpful. I just, I find that absolutely stunning and it seems to have never occurred to Matthew Dowd that the job here is to tell the truth, like that's the business we're in. We're in the truth business. And I think we're seeing the problems with this in the other, the way this has been reported. Jonah, I think some of the pushback that I've heard is, well, if they were covering it the whole time, like covering up the whole time, why would they be covering it so vigorously? now. And unfortunately, I think that just like Steve, you were saying, like, well, I'm not a Democrat, I don't think like a Democrat. I think there's sort of a failure of imagination to realize what a lot of people think at this point, which is the reason that they're covering it now is because they don't think Biden can win against Trump anymore. So it's still about beating Donald Trump. And they're actually just still kind of proving that point that, well, once everyone saw the debate, it was like an oh, no moment. You know, this is never a

about Joe Biden. It was about beating Donald Trump. And I guess I am concerned that this just further solidifies that narrative for a lot of people that all journalism is activist journalists at that point. Yeah. Look, I think it's a little from behind every door or, I don't know why you've abandoned your buckets to use doors, but whatever. I do think, I agree with that.

everything that Steve said directionally and all that, and I have such deja vu about the exact same arguments when you tell the truth about Donald Trump, right? But it's worth pointing out, like, Tim Miller is a long-time political comms consultant, you know, kind of guy, and Matthew Dowd, same thing. These are people who start from different assumptions about how you do politics than reporters or opinion journalists do.

And Tim Miller, who I've had a lot of disagreements with, you know, of late, to his credit, he is now in the gaslighting isn't helping camp on a lot of this stuff, right? The embarrassment, I agree, the Hadass Gold, that's the author, the reporter from CNN, where I'm a contributor, that you read that line from, that's bad. That's a sort of like, oh my gosh, did I say that out loud kind of thing? I couldn't believe it. Yeah, it's bad. It's not quoted.

It's just written as straight journalism. Yeah, I think it's very bad. I find there are all sorts of analogies that come to mind with all of this stuff. Steve and I, when we were at Fox, we used to talk about this all the time, but what we would call the Fox News Effect, which is that if Fox took a story really seriously, it gave permission to the rest of the mainstream media not to cover it properly. If, you know, Benghazi, Fox cares a lot about Benghazi, so Benghazi can't really matter that much. It was that kind of thing.

One of the examples I often use when I'm talking about this is the, the sexual impropriety stories at Fox, which were legitimate, when they came out about Bill O'Reilly and all the other gross stuff that was going on, the reaction from a lot of the gitchie goo media critics and reporters was to say, my gosh, see, this proves how gross fox is. This is a problem because right-wingers are misogynist pigs. And because they couldn't muster the imagination to think,

maybe this has more to do with just like powerful men in media across the media regardless of ideology it took a couple more years before the Me Too stuff came out where it turned out that oh look at all these scummy guys on you know for classic liberal guys were bad dudes too

we find this with like the border I think there was a lot of poopooing at the idea there was a crisis at the border and then all of a sudden when it became impossible for Biden politically not to say there was a crisis at the border all of a sudden a lot of journalists started calling it a crisis at the border. So, I mean, I think one of the things you got to tease out is like, if we just

say blanketly, the media, you're going to be unfair to some people because some people in the media behave responsibly. People like Matt Dow, he had partisan brain when he was a Republican, and now he has partisan brain because he's a Democrat. But, you know, I think about, you know, Jake Tapper, who I think has been doing a really aggressive and good job in the last week since the debate, you know, his interview with Chris Coons was just brutal. He's the one who got Corrine John Pierre to say, look, I can't even keep up with him about Joe Biden. And that was like a year ago. And if she can't keep up with Joe Biden, you know, we got to get a health check on her, right?

So I think that there's a big partisan soup atmosphere that the mainstream media generally operates within and they buy these assumptions and they turn these things into partisan, Republicans pounce kind of stories. I agree with you that some people in the media are covering this well now because they've made the calculation. They've got to get Biden out of there to

help beat Trump. I agree. That's certainly the motivation of the New York Times editorial board, right? There's no other universe in which they do that except that calculation. And they said so. Yeah. There are other people who I think feel like they really screwed the poot.

and now they're trying to overcompensate in the other direction. And there are sources that are available now that wouldn't have dreamed of talking to a reporter even on background before the debate. I think that's absolutely something that is only worth, you know, underline, et cetera. These stories wouldn't exist pre-debate because you wouldn't have had the sources for them.

But, you know, there's the Rob Her report. There's the Wall Street Journal story that had Republican sources of people who had met with Biden. And those weren't just not followed up on the way that I think they would have. have been, if they had been similar stories about Trump saying something insane in the Oval office, but with Democrats being the witnesses for it, they were attacked. You know, Rob Her, how many stories about Rob Her?

Well, he wants a judicial nomination from Donald Trump if he wins again. He's a partisan hack. Let me tell you all the things about, you know, what Rob Her was like at eight years old when he pushed some kid on the playground, you know, as a Republican eight-year-old. Instead of, this guy is testifying under penalty of perjury as to what he witnessed in three hours of conversations with Joe Biden, gee, I wonder who else has had experiences like that, even if I can't get them on the record, even if they're not from the political party that I want, you know, they're sure finding a lot of people now. I doubt that none of them were willing to talk

before the debate. I'd find that hard to believe. I just think they're shaking the trees, shaking more trees, shaking the trees harder, and a lot of fruit is falling to the ground. Okay. last thought on all of this does any of this change who Donald Trump picks as vice president as his vice presidential running mate at least let me just does any of this change who Donald Trump picks

as his vice presidential running mate lightning round Steve Hayes it could I think he had sort of narrowed down to three I believe the reporting I've done some reporting on this myself talked to a number of current and former Republicans including people who are talking directly to Trump about this choice.

I believe the reporting that we'd seen elsewhere over the past two weeks that the choice had been down to basically J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Bergam. I think my own sense is that last week

sort of Vance and Rubio were leading candidates. Bergham seems to have had some recovery this week. I think those were and probably remain the top candidates. I have heard about conversations that the Trump team has had in the past several days,

reviving the idea that he could look at Nikki Haley. I think she would accept it if he offered it. I think it's highly unlikely that Trump would actually do that and go there. But I think they're having those conversations mindful of the possibility that they could be facing Kamala Harris or somebody other than Joe Biden. Yeah, I think the most obvious consequence in the VP thing is it delays it, right? Because they're not going to want to make this pick until they know exactly who they're running against. And that kind of makes a lot of sense. Yep. I don't think he picks Nikki Haley because he had the

Sussam's reporting a while back that said, look, at the end of the day, you just got to like the person you're running with and I don't like her. And I don't think, you know, we're talking about how stubborn Joe Biden is Donald Trump's kind of stubborn too. So I don't see that that happening. I suspect it would be Marco Rubio. I suspect this helps Marco Rubio and Bergo more than Vance. If Biden stays in the race and runs, I think then it helps Vance. The more confident Trump feels like he's going to win,

the better Vance's chances are. The more he feels like it's going to be a race and a close call, the more it helps Rubio, Rubio, I think. All right. And with that, happy 4th of July, everyone. and let's put a link to the show notes, Jonah, to that speech. Yeah, I'll, your wish is someone's command. I don't know how to get that in the show notes. Happy Independence Day.

All right, we're out. See you guys. Oh, oh.