The Dispatch Podcast - Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns on ‘This Will Not Pass’

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

There is no shortage of stuff to talk about in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, the new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, and Steve does his best to discuss all of it in this week’s Dispatch Podcast. As Steve says, “The book makes you feel like you are in the room.” The trio breaks it all down—from January 6, those now infamous Kevin McCarthy recordings, and the early days of the Biden administration. Burns and Martin respond to McCarthy’s accusation that they took his comments “out of context.” Plus, why does Biden want to “do it all?” Finally, how do the authors deal with critics on the right that immediately write them off because they work for The New York Times?   Show Notes: -This Will Not Pass by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns -Recordings of McCarthy saying he will urge President Trump to resign Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Today I am joined by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns of the New York Times, who have a new book out, This Will Not Pass, Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future. You probably have heard about the book. You may have read passages from the book. It's certainly been the subject of a lot of discussion and reporting out of Washington over the past couple of weeks. They joined me for an hour-long conversation on the details of the book and their reporting and what it all means. Jonathan, Alex, thanks for joining us on the dispatch podcast. Thanks for having us on the dispatch podcast. Thanks, Steve. I want to focus first on Republicans, then on Democrats. I want to mix in some questions about reporting and writing process, which I find interesting. I think our listeners will find interesting, and then I want to finish with a couple of questions about what it all means. But I'm going to try to be sort of fast so we can get to as much my book is totally marked up and dog-eared the way that a good book should be. I want to cover a lot. I want to start

on January 6th. You report in the book that both Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell believe that Trump's behavior that day was appalling and impeachable. And you also, you also, you also report that in the days after the violence, both Republican leaders believed that there would be enough Republican support to impeach and remove him. This is why McCarthy said he was going to call Trump, tell him to resign, and what McConnell told two aides in a meeting. This section jumped out at me for as much reporting as I had done, as many conversations as I'd had had about January 6th and about Republicans and the days and weeks after that.

I never, it never sort of jumped out at me the way that it did in your really terrific reporting. Is it fair to conclude that if Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell had led, if they'd acted on their convictions, Donald Trump would have been impeached, convicted, and removed? I think that they certainly would have gotten real close. You know, one of the things that we report in the book from the Democratic side is that as the impeachment trial was unfolding in the Senate, the impeachment managers felt like, you know, they were going to get a decent chunk of Republican votes. They might get, you know, in the high 50s, which is obviously where they ended up getting. But that, you know, basically their Hail Mary was if we get McConnell,

then suddenly a whole bunch of other votes come into play. You know, people like your, you know, your John Thunes and, you know, your John Cornans, right? People who are by no means sort of moderate Republicans or solid ideological conservatives. But, you know, left to their own devices and given it, given the kind of cover of McConnell voting to convict, you know, maybe they would be in play. And I think most of our reporting from the Republican side supports that idea that, you know, if McConnell in particular had led in the way he sounded like he was open to leading in the days immediately after January 6th, you know, maybe you still only get a 64, 65 votes to convict. Like, it's not a sure thing,

but you certainly get really, really close to conviction. And, and, you know, there was reporting in real time in the times that mccano was was leaning towards that kind of a vote what happened can you just take us through that time period and sort of McConnell's thinking in his conversations and how he ended up being so disgusted with what he had seen and so offended sort of as an institutionalist and yet ended up giving a tough speech about trump but not pushing to to convict Yeah. I mean, I think he looked around at his conference and just didn't see an appetite to do this. And then, you know, in that same period, there was this sort of light preserver that he and other Republicans grabbed onto, which was the constitutional question of whether you could convict somebody who was no longer in office. And that sort of he seized it. You know, this is mostly forgotten to history, but ran Paul brought up a point of order. It was effectively a test vote before the final conviction vote on impeachment.

And I think it got like five or six, maybe just five Republicans. And we have this moment right after that in which McConnell tells somebody. Look, I didn't get to be Republican leader by voting with five members of my conference. And so I think, you know, it just like McCarthy, there wasn't the will in the conference. And I don't think McConnell was willing to push them. He wasn't willing to spend the capital that he would have had to to have found the votes. I think it's possible, and this is a great, you know, counterfactual for history. I think it's possible that if McConnell really had pushed his conference, he could have found enough Republicans.

I think it would have been close. But you just go through that roster and you find a combination of Republicans who are going to retire in 2020. and those who are sort of traditional with Republicans who probably aren't going to run again for re-election 24, 26. And it adds up, you know. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's sort of where I come down. I mean, it's interesting to me to hear you characterize it and to read, certainly read the reporting in the book where it's a vote counting exercise for them. Are the votes there or are they not there? At one time, he seemed to think that if they weren't there, they could be there. But it's almost as if it never occurred to him to get the votes there. I mean, Jonathan,

just what you just said there, you know, I didn't, I didn't become leader by pushing on votes with five people. I mean, in your sense, in your reporting, did it ever occur to him or to Kevin McCarthy in the House to lead people to the conclusion that they thought was warranted by what had happened? Well, Al, do you want to take that? Sure. I mean, I think we have no, indication in our reporting that either of them was really attempted to do that. And even in the days when McConnell is telling people, you know, if this isn't impeachable, then nothing is, the Democrats are going to take care of the son of the bitch for us. In those days, you know, he's leaving even pretty close lieutenants in the Senate more or less in the dark about what his intentions are. And that is

certainly not the behavior of somebody who is gearing up to lead, even like a semi-public, you know, within the halls of Congress kind of campaign to try to shape opinion, rather than to, you know, sort of keep his cards close to his vest and then play them as, as events warrant. I, you know, with McCarthy obviously had fewer levers to work with just because the House Minority Leader is, you know, comparatively a powerless and sort of semi-relevant figure in our congressional politics. And he showed no particular indication that he was really serious about using the levers that he did have. But, you know, I think one of the really big sort of rounds that was never fired here was somebody big on Capitol Hill at the leadership

level, you know, not just sort of privately expressing anguish and privately talking through options for punishing Trump, but sort of making the case not, not even just to Congress, but to the country, right? That we detail in the book how so many of these Republican leaders sort of took the temperature of their caucus or their conference and took the temperature of voters back home and then concluded the will just isn't there. We don't have anybody saying, you know, the sort of the sort of old Gene McCarthy line, right, that, you know, well, I guess I just have to take this to the people. They never get close to doing that. Right. I would say other than Liz Janie, right? I mean, she basically makes the case and, you know, seems to think at least

initially that she might be able to persuade people. I think she's just so outraged by what's happened by what she's seen that she can persuade people to come along. But it was pretty clear, pretty quick. I mean, getting into the Kevin McCarthy calls that that was not right. You spend some time sort of making, pointing out the differences between the way that Liz Cheney handled the day and the way that Mitch McConnell handled the day. And the fact that they were pretty open in their disagreement, at least after things went public. Where was their big difference and how much were they coordinating or not? I think you have to start with, yeah, the coordination was striking.

I mean, I think Cheney and McConnell, and this is not reported about widely. We're talking quite a bit leading up to and then on and after January 6th, they were close allies. In fact, McConnell issues a statement in February of 21, a paper statement, praising Liz Cheney as an important leader in the party when she's, you know, it's starting to be targeted by the sort of Trump forces. And they were sort of like, I think, talking quite a bit. And then as we get into the spring, I think is where the relationship breaks down. Because, you know, Liz Cheney will not stop talking about Trump and the threat that Trump

poses and poses to the country in her mind. and McConnell at this point just is straight political assessment talking about Trump still does not help us take back to the majority in 22 period end of sentence and I think as Cheney tells us for the book that they just had a difference of opinion at that point about what Trump represented Cheney believes that you have sort of keep talking about the threat he poses and McConnell believes that Trump is going to basically. lose altitude to borrow one of his favorite phrases over a period of time, and there's sort of no use and sort of continuing to give him oxygen by confronting him. And that is the root of their breakdown, Steve. And it looks like McConnell may get sort of half of what he wants, right? He may well end up Senate Majority Leader. Certainly doesn't look at this point like Trump is fading away and the way that McConnell calculated or miscalculated. Look, the entire book you have this sort of in the room feel, and I would say a level of sort of authority that lots of the other books in this genre don't quite get.

I'd say nowhere is that more true than the reporting on the events of January 6th. How did you all go about reporting that day? Well, I mean, I'll leave that mainly to Jonathan because he had the, you know, misfortune as a human being, but a great fortune as a reporter of actually being in the complex during the insurrection. And I think that was clearly an invaluable element of what we were able to gather. Look, I think we cast a really wide net in who we spoke to about the experience of that day. We spoke not just to leadership in both parties, but to the rank and file, to different factions

of the rank and file in both parties. And, you know, I think we felt going into our account of the insurrection and the hours before and after the insurrection, the bar was going to be pretty high for us to tell readers something that they didn't already know, that if what we ended up supplying was, you know, the tale of Pence being evacuated from the Senate floor, the heroism of the high highest profile members of the Capitol Police, that that was going to be really, really familiar to readers and that if we were going to bring them something different and eye-opening, we needed to make both the political attention of the day much more vivid and also needed

to animate the experience of individual members of Congress who truly felt and with good reason that their lives were in danger. And so I think that's sort of broadly how we went about reporting it, but Jonathan should speak to his own firsthand experience of the day. Yeah, I think two things, Steve, I think one, being there. I think it's a great lesson for a journalist that, you know, if you're not sure whether or not to go, usually the right answer is to go. And like, I don't just be politics. I mean, like, a lot of different beats. I think just being there, obviously, on the sixth itself was important for the book. But also, because of COVID shutting down our bureau and because of other external factors.

Like, I'd just spend a lot of time in the Capitol before and after January 6th. I think just being around there and talking to members in those days was helpful for reporting the book. And the other point that I would make is, you know, Robert Carrow has this line of turn every page when you're doing research. I think what our version of that would be like contact almost every office and by that I mean you know Alex said casting a wide net like he's not he's not bragging like as the old satchel page page line goes it ain't bragging if you done it um look we reached down to a lot of different people at all levels of government in Washington and beyond And a lot of people who frankly just don't talk to the press that much, in part because

they aren't contacted by the press or because they don't really trust the press. And we were able to sort of leverage of those sources to get a fuller, richer picture of what we think is a really consequential period in American history. So one of the ways in which you provided that fuller richer picture was by obtaining audio tapes. You got your hands on tapes of Kevin McCarthy telling colleagues on a phone call that he was prepared to go ask Donald Trump to resign. So you first report this and he denied that he'd done what you claimed he'd done. Took a shot at the New York Times, fake news, the whole thing. And then a short time later, after he kind of hung himself with his false denial,

you released the tapes removing any doubt that he'd said exactly what you had reported, he'd said. So he lies. He gets caught in a lie and it's a bad, ugly lie. When people asked him about it and asked his allies in the House Republican conference about it, they claimed the tapes were deceptively edited and that you'd taken him out of context. Is that true? No, it's not. Look, I think what our initial story about his comments said and what the book says is that he was anguished and tortured on this call, that they talked about a number of options for punishing Trump or removing him from office, including censure, including invoking the 25th Amendment, and that at one point McCarthy outlined the closest thing he ever had to a plan, which was to say, I'm going to, I think I'm going to call up Trump and tell him he should resign. And I don't expect him to take that suggestion. And that's what we reported. That's what McCarthy denied.

And he specifically denied that he ever said that he was going to call Trump and tell him to resign. So we released the audio demonstrating that his denial was bogus. It's not out of context. The context of the article, the context of the book is totally faithful to his comments. You know, I think that he made the unfortunate mistake of issuing a categorical denial of something that he quite literally said. And I think that, you know, I mean, it speaks to his character. It speaks to his political judgment. You know, I think that there probably were Republicans who might have been prepared to forgive him or look past his actual comments if he had been honest up front and said,

listen, we talked about a bunch of different options on that call, including resignation, but I never actually called a President Trump and told him to resign, which as far as we can determine is totally true. But he decided instead to lie and attack the Times and the media and us as reporters. And that was obviously a mistake on his part. At the House Republican Conference a few days later, McCarthy, by several accounts, received a standing ovation from at least some of the GOP caucus. Do you know what they were applauding exactly? And have you talked to people who were in the room about what the sense was in that moment? Look, I think there's a rallying effect around. and Kevin McCarthy, not because of the substance of what we wrote or because of the lie he told afterwards, but because for a good number, Steve, of those House Republicans, it's the media

writing a tough story about their leader. And like, that's what they care about. It's, they're taking the side of him against the media broadly. I think you have to recognize that's where a lot of folks and the party are. And we get that. I will just say, though, I think, like, the short-term relief he gets should not mask the longer-term damage here. I think his credibility has obviously taken a blow. And I think everybody in Congress, and covers Congress recognizes that. And also, Kevin McCarthy is only as strong as Donald Trump lets him be. If Donald Trump decides for whatever reason that he doesn't trust McCarthy anymore or he's had enough McCarthy, that's going to create enormous problems for Kevin McCarthy. I mean, McCarthy wakes up every day, not really

controlling his own political fate, Steve. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's certainly consistent with the conversations I've had since then. I've talked to several Republicans who say, including some close allies of McCarthy, you say this standing ovation or partial standing ovation masks this growing frustration with McCarthy in the conference. One person who's not a prominent critic of Kevin McCarthy said he was really tired from having to defend McCarthy sort of again and again and again. And you do get the sense that while they're all sort of clasping hands, Trump comes out and gets McCarthy's back, they're all rallying to him, that there may well be some long-term fallout from this that's not evident right now.

particularly as they try to beat up Joe Biden and go to the win the election. So big picture question on the Republicans in this moment for you. I mean, and Jonathan, certainly you and I have talked about this a lot over the years. I've been telling people that Republican and conservative views about this period would change once the kind of definitive histories have been written and it becomes clear that what a elective Republicans and conservative media figures were saying when they were praising Trump in public and they were doing something close to the opposite in private, which we know and to the extent that we can tell people, we try to tell people. But I would say that this is sort of that

first cut at the definitive history. And you had Kevin McCarthy on tape. Do you think that we're at a point where polarization is just more powerful than the truth? And if that's true, does it last beyond this moment? Well, I think we're clearly in a moment when polarization matters more than just about anything else. And I think that it does, it is the major reason why someone like McCarthy is shielded from the short-term consequences of lying the way his predecessors probably would not have been. It's taken such a cultural toll on us as a people, as a political system, the sort of notion that a leader would just sort of have any sense of honor about lying and being caught in a lie is obviously long gone in most parts of our political system.

I do think that there is reason to believe, as Jonathan was saying before, that this stuff does sort of carry a price over time and that being seen as a fundamentally dishonest person, you know, the bill for that ultimately does come due sooner or later, that most of these people who are lying to their voters or to their colleagues or to themselves about what they really think about Donald Trump only get away with that. because they're also under the protective umbrella of Donald Trump, right? That the lie only lasts as long as Trump allows it to last. And in a world where Trump decides, I'm not saying I think this is likely, but a world where he decides, actually I'm kind of done with politics, I'm going to spend more time with my money and my golf courses, or, you know, Trump is mortal just like the rest of us, and there will be a time when he is no longer the leader of the Republican Party

for actuarial reasons. I don't know that that culture of just sort of brazen dishonesty persists because you don't have sort of this giant 8,000 pound political gorilla protecting you from any consequences on your own side. Yeah, boy, that's, I mean, I'd say that's an optimistic view. I wish I shared it more, more enthusiastically. I worry that we've gotten to the point where because there has been such a long period of, I mean, long and relative terms.

of a lack of punishment for this kind of aggressive dishonesty, in some cases, aggressive dishonesty, in some cases, casual dishonesty about sort of anything and everything, things of the greatest importance and things that matter not at all, that it's hard to get back to that earlier. I mean, not that politics has been a forum for honesty, for the heights of honesty over the years. I just feel like we've sort of reached new lows. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss,

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Let me, speaking of honesty, let me turn to Democrats. A lot of the reporting out of your book has focused on what you uncovered about the Republicans and the way that you wrote about Trump in January 6th and the election and the aftermath, Kevin McCarthy and the tapes. But there's some really interesting in the room reporting on Democrats, too, and on Joe Biden, on his campaign, on the early days of his presidency. And I want to spend a few minutes focused on that here. One of the things that was really interesting, and I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I hadn't really thought of the framing before I read it the way that you guys put it was Trump sort of being open. and unapologetic about the fact that he was dividing the country, sort of said, I'm going to be president for this chunk of the country, and for the rest of you, you know, go to hell, in effect. Really open in his 2016 campaign about it, really open as president about it, has been open ever since about it. Joe Biden, of course, ran the opposite kind of campaign, said he was going

to bring the country back together. This is particularly in the early days of the Democratic primary, going to bring the country back together. He was a uniter in his inaugural. He said unity is in his soul. And he hasn't done that at all. And I would say one of the things that the reporting brings out is the extent to which that was deliberate. He made political calculations that he knew would continue to divide the country. And I guess I'm struck by, you know, as much as I'm critical of Donald Trump for this deliberate division kind of as a governing philosophy and a political approach. I'm equally offended by Joe Biden, who says he's going to unite the country and really doesn't do much ever to pretend that he does.

I'm wondering, did other people sort of come to the same conclusion? Did Biden advisors, are they aware that this is the effect that he's had and that that too will really make it hard for people to come together? Well, I think the whole Biden White House from the president on down got carried away in the spring of 2021. with the possibility that he could be an enormously consequential president. And they saw the sort of end of COVID, that potentially the end of Trump. And wow, we have this majority. We never thought we'd have, thanks to Georgia. We can really go big.

And I think it gets to the heart of the sort of tension that Biden brings to the office, which is this sort of duality of A. wanting to be a unifying, healing president, his empathy gene, probably his best asset, somebody who's going to sort of bring the country back after our own long national nightmare. And also, he's a career of, you know, half-century politician who's always wanted this job and he wants to do big consequential things. And by the way, he wouldn't mind being a bigger figure on policy than Barack Obama, who is somebody who he has his rivalry with that we capture in the book. And he's never.

totally gotten over the treatment that he, Biden, got as vice president from the Obama White House. So I think all of that is sort of wrapped up, Steve, in where Biden winds up in the spring and summer of 2021, really sort of putting aside the imperative for unity and for healing and instead really going sort of pedal to the metal with trying to create this big legacy. A big legacy, by the way, that may be his only one, because obviously he's the oldest president in American history and somebody who may just serve one term. So that's also, I think, in the back of their minds, too. If we want to go big, we have to do it now and to get as much done as we can this year and next year more than big terms. So I want to get to the spring and summer of 2021 and the things that he did then.

And looking back to the campaign, you all write about Biden taking this sort of big message of unity, returning the country to normal, sort of caretaker, making people feel comfortable with him as a post-Trump remedy, but then get to the point where he's effectively secured the nomination and then rather than do what candidates from both political parties have done for years, which is tacked to the middle, he goes about consolidating the left of the Democratic Party. I'd be interested in just getting your sense of how that happened or what compelled him to do that and whether that leads us to the kind of governing that we saw in the early years

of the Biden presidency. It's a really good question. I think the answer is it certainly does lead us. I think you draw a straight line from Biden's behavior in the months after he is, effectively secured the nomination to the kind of hubris in 2021 that Jonathan was just talking about. And Steve, I think that like so many other episodes in Biden's career, the boundary lines between the evolution of his personal beliefs and the evolution of the sort of immediate tactical political imperatives that he feels that there's a really, really blurry

boundary line between those things. So, you know, look, he becomes the nominee. And for all the sort of, you know, end zone dancing on the part of his advisors and the sort of rubbing it in the faces of the press corps that you underestimated us all along, I think there is a recognition in more honest moments that, boy, did they catch some big breaks on the way to the nomination, that if Michael Bloomberg hadn't imploded the way he did, you know, at the hands of Elizabeth Warren, if Bernie Sanders hadn't run way to the left and gotten bogged down in South Carolina, just as he seemed to be, you know, engaging a debate about Fidel Castro just at the moment that he seemed to be pulling ahead, that maybe Biden doesn't sort of lock up the

nomination at exactly the right moment as COVID is striking. And I think there's a recognition on the part of Biden, his advisors, that, you know, there's not a great enthusiasm for him on the part of much of the Democratic coalition, that he's got to do something to make sure that particularly young people and white liberals, and the sort of larger activist wing of the party does feel invested in him in the fall. And they do that in some pretty unsubtle ways by tacking left on policy. But at the same time, this is also a moment where COVID has struck the country when Congress is rushing out massive amounts of emergency spending to prop up the economy and aid the American people. And there is, you know, it's very far, it already feels like the

very distant past, although it's two years ago. There was this extended moment in the spring of 2020 where folks on the left and even folks in, you know, closer to the political center felt like this is going to change people's relationship to government, you know, now and forever. And that's where the sort of FDR fantasy really starts to open up for Biden, right? That this is an invitation to redraw the way our country works, basically from top to bottom. And for a combination of ideological and tactical reasons, Joe Biden finds that pretty tempting. Yeah, and I think, you know, that's a really interesting answer. I think sometimes there's a tendency, and I'm criticizing myself for doing this here, to want to impose on that

recent history a kind of simplicity that just doesn't exist. I mean, and I think this comes out in the book, you can see Biden going back and forth a little bit. I mean, it seems like sometimes he really does want to return the country to what he sees as normal. Sometimes he does want to unify the country. And then at other times, you know, he just gets carried away by the moment or he listens to advisors who are saying you can be the big, you could be the big transformational president. No. And Steve, this was too late for us to get into the book. But there's a great example of that in a period of 24 hours earlier this year, Biden goes to Atlanta, delivers a blistering speech on voting rights and basically tells Republican lawmakers, do you want to

be Bull Connor or John Lewis? And, you know, the response he gets from Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, is sort of outrage. And the next day, Biden's in the U.S. Capitol and goes to McConnell's office to try to basically patch things up with McConnell. That's the two Joe Biden's right there on this flight in a period of 24 hours. And it's also why Democrats are so frustrated with Biden because they know he's not able to drive a consistent message. Obviously, he's trying to do so now. He's talking more about MAGA Republicans and targeting Rick Scott, but it's always this question of consistency and Biden's willingness to stay on message. And he's never been able to do that. A real fast plug, we have this section at the end of the book in which Paul Begala,

the famed Clinton strategist, goes to Ron Clayne and presents claim with like a classic Clinton line, which was, Alex can correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Republicans are more scared of Donald Trump and they care about you or something like that, right? You can just hear Bill Clinton saying it, you know. And Clayton is pretty blunt with Pagala. He's known for a year. It's like, you know, Biden, that's just not Biden's thing, Paul. It's just not who Biden is, right? And like the idea of like Joe Biden out there every day laying the wood, to Republicans, going into the midterms, it's just hard to see, you know. And yet, that's what we have seen from him in the last couple of days.

He gives this speech about trying to blame Rick Scott for wanting to raise taxes and Republicans for inflation. And it just, it feels like it's not going to hit. And it's also very difficult to recognize. I think for people who aren't paying attention to every twist and turn of politics, every single day, people who are out sort of leading their lives. It is totally inconsistent with the way that they remember him, or many of them remember him running for president. He was going to run as the unity guy. Let me follow up on that one point you made. You know, there is this conventional

wisdom. I think it's supported by a fair amount of reporting that, you know, Biden continues to be pulled left by his, by the advisors in the White House, by Ron Clean and others. And, you know, the the super woke young staff at the White House has sort of outsized influence. And that's helped really drive the direction of the Biden presidency to the left. I think there's truth to that, certainly. But I also wonder just how much is Biden being sort of directionless? He's another one who doesn't seem to me, based on the account in your book and everything I've observed over the past couple years, he's not really leading.

he's just sort of being you know floating along in the in the stream of the river um how much of it is Biden not sort of grasping the the reins of leadership and how much is it uh his staff pulling him left how how should we understand that so i think there's two there's two things that i've note there one is you know people in the administration will say this certainly people on the hill will say this is that Biden is still acting like a senator uh that he's not he doesn't see himself uh as in a position to command a certain policy direction from his friends and former colleagues in Congress, that he's sort of governing by trying to take the measure of where the Democratic coalition is and chart a path roughly through the middle of it.

But that, of course, makes him super vulnerable to the whims of people on the far left and people who are much, much closer to the political center within his own party who don't necessarily have consistent views themselves on some of these. these issues. So I think that's sort of challenge number one. It's just a temperamental challenge, a challenge related to Biden's basic orientation. I think the reality of the staff issue is definitely true. We go into some depth in the book about divisions within the Biden palace guard ideologically. But I think that ultimately you have to lay this on Biden himself, right? That plenty of presidents have a set of, I think every president has advisors who

are more ideological, advisors who are more pragmatic, but that ultimately it's down to the president to set the agenda and set the direction of the administration. And one of the things that we, I think, capture pretty clearly is in the summer of 21, Biden meeting with different groups from Capitol Hill and trying on the one hand to assure the Joe Manchin's of the world, and really there's only one Joe Manchin of the world trying to reassure Joe Manchin. You know, I hear you. I'm not going to make you take votes that cut against your conscience.

But on the other hand, meeting with folks from the Congressional Progressive calls, and telling them, you know, thank you for standing up for my entire agenda, right? And giving Pramila Jayapal a copy of his speech to Congress where he outlines the full sweeping FDR-scale domestic agenda that he wanted to enact. And it's not that I think necessarily in that moment Biden's being dishonest with a mansion and then later being dishonest with Jayapal or vice versa, is that I think he wants to do it all, right? He wants to be a Joe Manchin's friend. He wants to be FDR. He wants to get along with Rob Portman and do deals with Mitch McCauley wants to do it all at the same time. And obviously is found that when you're trying to do it all, sometimes the result

is that you don't get to do very much. I thought that the Jayapal moment was very interesting. She's the representative who's the leader of the Progressive Caucus in the House. And you have a couple of sort of scenes back to back where you have Kirsten Cinema, the senator from Arizona who's been sort of a difficult person for Biden, certainly not going along with his agenda. And you have Jayapal who could be a difficult person for Biden, but whom he seems more determined to appeal to and sort of handhold. And that struck me not just in that moment, but throughout the parts of the book that are about Joe Biden is he does seem much more attuned to the needs and interests of progressives as opposed to the centrist that many people thought he

was years ago. Am I wrong to read it that way? I don't think, I mean, look, I mean, Mitch McConnell has very strong fuels on this. He says, I served with moderate Democrats. Joe Biden was never one of them. I think Biden is hard to anchor in any wing of the party. If you look at his career, he's kind of been wherever he thought the party's center was. He was a Kennedy man early on, and then obviously when he sort of DLC rose in the early 90s, I think he was plenty comfortable with that crowd. Obviously, he wrote the crime bill when Bill Clinton was president. So I guess that's not comfortable sort of putting Biden in any one ideological sort of fixed place.

I do think you're right that he wants to be seen as, if you will, hip to the kids. One of the biggest Joe Biden lines is, you know, when climate change comes up, he loves to say, I wrote the first climate bill ever in Congress because he just still has to prove his credentials with the current crowd. And, you know, Pramilla J. Apoll is on MSNBC and he calls her afterwards to give her a shout out because he wants to sort of be in that world. But at the same time, like, he's happy to talk about like John Eastland and like Lister Hill and like cutting deals. these old sags, and like, you know, to make the point that he can do business with Mitch McConnell and to lament that like the polarized capital today, like, is worse than it was when they had actual segregationists there who at least you could do deals with and like have some bean soup with in the Senate dining room. And these days, they don't even talk to each other.

So it's like, it's just, Steve, it's just a different Biden for a different day, depending upon, you know, what audience he wants to kind of ingratiate in the moment. You mentioned his dealings with old sags. You raised Biden's age at several points in your reporting in what I would describe as a relatively gentle and respectful manner. But it's a big deal. You don't have to be sort of a partisan or somebody interested in cheap shots like Sean Hannity to be worried about it.

And Biden, when he gives these speeches, he often has interjections that literally don't make sense. When he's speaking extemporaneously, he routinely wanders down these verbal cul-de-sacs and seems not to know how he got there and where he's going. How much of a concern is that for the Biden advisors and Democrats in Congress that you spoke to for the book. Oh, I think it's a massive concern. And I think, you know, you alluded to the sort of Sean Hannity version of the age issue.

And I think that's the only, frankly, the Hannity style discourse on Biden's age is the only reason why it's not a more open subject of conversation in the Democratic Party that there is this feeling that if you engage the subject of the president's advanced age and, you know, his obvious, obvious signs that he has sort of just slowed down in his public performance, that suddenly you're veering into this sort of like deranged conspiracy theory world where like Biden's a marionette on strings pulled by, whoever, right? But no, Democrats talk constantly about this in private. And I think they're going to talk more and more openly about it as we approach the midterms and get past the midterms. You know, I think that one of the things that is

challenging in sort of depicting this in the book is that, you know, we have no indication that Biden is experiencing a cognitive decline, right? We don't have scenes in our reporting where people are talking to him about the infrastructure bill and, you know, he thinks they're talking about like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or something, right? That's not the sort of category of stuff that we're talking about. But yeah, slower to come up with a name, slower to come up with specifics, the verbal cul-de-sacs that you're talking about. And Steve, I think one of the biggest tells that we do get into in the book is a real lack of travel and vigor in his salesmanship, that one of the only ways that Biden would ever criticize the Obama administration was talking about

how the salesmanship was weak. We had great policies. We just didn't sell them to the country, at least that's his version of it. And he said during the primaries in 20, I'm not going to let that happen again. And he has very, very much let that happen again. I think when we were reporting this book, we thought that after the American Rescue Plan passed, we would see Biden spend most of calendar year 2021 reopening schools and going to ground breakings and police stations and firehouses that were funded by the law. And instead, he's barely been west of the Mississippi as president. That's obviously related to his age.

Yeah. And it's certainly, I mean, if I'm talking to Democrats who speak rather openly, I mean, they don't want to be quoted, but they're willing to talk about their concerns about this. I can imagine that both of you are much better sourced among Democrats than I am hear this quite a bit. I mean, and Alex, we did hear just the other day an example of the kind of real miss that you're talking about that that doesn't feature much in the book. I mean, you know, he was asked about Title 42 and he went off and I believe he started talking about COVID and masks. And I mean, it was just a, they were two things that didn't connect at all. And I think we've seen more and more of that in such a way that I would expect this does become a pretty big issue as,

as we go move forward toward 2024. You know, the other thing I'll say about that is I think it's a place where he is not well served by the instinct of his staff to clean up the sort of honest but inconvenient stuff that he blurts out by then turning on the fog machine and saying, well, actually the president wasn't saying what he was obviously saying about regime change in Russia. He was saying this other thing that like if you look at his literal words would make absolutely no sense, right? So they sort of feed this impression that he's constantly disoriented and not talking straight, even in times when he is talking extremely straight and just saying stuff that his staff, which is he wouldn't say. Yeah, let me ask one more

question about the Biden administration and then move to a couple big picture questions to close. You guys really detailed sort of the best history that I've read of the vice presidential search, the running mate search for Biden. And one of the things that really jumps out is the extent to which Kamala Harris was willing to savage the competition, employing sort of third party cutouts potentially. and the extent to which those on the receiving end of the criticism and the Apo leaks were well aware that it was Kamala Harris. She seems to have been willing to do just about anything to take the position, despite the fact that there were some reservations from people very close to Joe Biden to give it to her. Given everything that's happened since, do you think that the people who had those reservations about Kamala Harris as vice president feel vindicated, validated in some way?

Oh, privately, they definitely do. Now, I think that's the broader democratic orbit, Steve. I think within the Biden White House, it'd be harder to find somebody that would straightforward say, you know, that this wasn't a mistake. But certainly among the sort of broader universe of sort of democratic insiders and officials, yeah, you sort of definitely get that sense of this was, this is not going well. I think it's a little bit more complicated within the White House itself. I think they have their frustrations with the vice president, but there's not a contempt for her. It's more just a frustration with her. And, you know, why is there the sort of constant turn with her staff?

Obviously, it's happened to her whole career. You know, maybe she's the problem. But I think that choice was made in sort of the short term because, everything Biden was doing in that period was with one goal in line, which is how we beat Donald Trump. There was not some thought out plan for, oh, what's her portfolio going to be? And hey, Biden's going to be 80 years old. Can he run for re-election? Is she become the de facto nominee for us in 24th?

I don't think any of that was on their mind. It was more just what makes the most sense for this moment. What's safe, right? I mean, he wanted safety. It was the safest pick. It was the sort of, I think as one person told us, it was the least worst option. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. So big picture question about the reporting, you know, and I know you've been asked this before, but when you're doing a book like this and you work for the New York Times, obviously there's this imperative to get the news out but you held obviously quite a bit of news I mean the tapes themselves are are sort of extraordinary a number of different tapes in a number of

different or recordings in a number of different scenarios first did you how do you do that do you feel sort of compelled to keep it to make sure that the book does well and that there's a lot of good stuff for the book and how do you as people who are used to breaking news avoid putting that out right when you get it. Well, in some cases, and I think we're not going to do sort of like a case-by-case answer on this one, but in some cases, you know, you're forbidden by source agreements from putting the information out in real time. And I think one of the things that any book author, I think including present company, would

confirm is that people are going to be a lot more candid with you, with their on-the-record comments, with their recollections, and with primary source materials. if they think it's not going to appear in the paper tomorrow or on Twitter in 45 seconds, right? And so, you know, that was certainly a limiting factor in a lot of what we did. That doesn't mean it's necessarily easy for us on a sort of temperamental and constitutional level, right? That this is the first book for both of us. And, you know, all our training is to, yeah, get it out like right now. And it there's...

I've been with Jonathan when he's had a scoop and, you know, he wasn't we were on a plane i think i've told the story before maybe the last time you were on we were on a plane he had a scoop and this was before you could get on wifi on planes and he couldn't do it and physically shaking physically like one of those a creative sentencing things right it was so i mean it was i felt bad i honestly felt bad for you but it was highly amusing as someone who didn't have a scoop but so like it's challenging but it's also in a different way kind of liberating right if if you're told, like, you cannot use this right now, right? You have to save this and make it count in a different way. Well, like, you know, you have to go through the process of accepting

those constraints and just dealing with the sort of emotional challenges associated with that. But at the end of the day, it does empower you to tell a bigger kind of story. Hayes, imagine being on that plane for 16 months with me and sitting on like dynamite material. but unable to talk about it with anybody and hoping that it holds. Alex, I'm so sorry. Like 450 pages worth. I'm so sorry.

You had to do this. I mean, it is interesting. Do you guys ever have the sense? I mean, this happened to me particularly when I was researching, reporting and writing, I did a biography about Dick Cheney was writing the Cheney book.

And you'd be in the middle of interviewing somebody and you could see, you could actually physically see them sort of switch into, I am talking for history mode. Did you come across that? Oh, absolutely. And it's a sort of surreal thing when, you know, it's not like we're doing an interview

project that's embargoed until like 2035 or something. This isn't a time capsule. It's material that's going to come out in 16 months or so. But that separation and also I just think the format of the book in the sense that you're speaking for something more durable that's going to be consumed on library shelves, hopefully for a long time, and not just by. I, you know, sort of especially enterprising grad students who are going to look over these articles in microfiche, I do think people feel a certain, you know, a liberty to speak and also a certain

responsibility to speak. Yeah. So when you describe Donald Trump, you do this at the beginning in the introduction, then you do it throughout the book. You depict him as an authoritarian demagogue who presents a threat to the republic. In fact, there are several points in the book in which you basically say that. I mean, that's almost a direct quote. Half of the country voted for the guy. He seems likely maybe to be the Republican nominee again in two years if he runs. Most Republicans still view him favorably, and they buy as claims that the 2020 election was stolen. When you're writing something like that, I can hear some of my conservative friends reading this and saying, ah, that's just their opinion. These guys, New York Times, left-wing bias, they're

You know, they're injecting their opinion about Donald Trump. How did you come to describe him that way? And was there ever a moment where you said, man, maybe we shouldn't describe him in that kind of aggressive language because we want more people to read it? No, I think that that's never been a challenge for us. I think that we understand the material and know who he is. And I think you have to be honest with your readers. I think one of the frustrations that I think all of us can have with the

conventions of journalism and writing is this sort of tendency toward euphemism or sort of backing into things or how do we present things in a way that doesn't really capture the heart of the matter. And we just, we were so thrilled about this project because on so many levels, not just Trump, we could sort of put in the print a conversation that we've been having, Alex and I have had for years about a number of people and of sort of facts of American political life. And, Steve, I know you experienced this. The fact is we know who Donald Trump is a lot better than most American voters because we have talked to him. We've talked to his advisors. We know what he was doing and saying as president. And the facts bear out our description.

They just do, you know. The other thing I would just tack on to that is, you know, authoritarian demagogues and extreme figures across the political spectrum win elections all the time all over the world. And I think we're very conscious of the fact that almost half the country voted for Donald Trump twice, but that doesn't sort of absolve us of the responsibility to speak plainly about who he is. And that I think one of the real tensions in political reporting in this time has been trying to reckon with what Trump is and also the very real appeal that he holds over people and that he, you know, the political force that he represents. That it's not all just a matter of people being sort of tricked by the Russians on Facebook or like fed disinformation

on Twitter and they've been sort of duped into voting for the guy. That extreme leaders have considerable appeal on the right and on the left in elections all over. over the world. And I think one of the things that has been challenging for us and for American readers is to recognize that that's just as true here as it is in a place like Brazil or Italy or the Philippines. Yeah. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff that he's done over the past couple of years, I mean, sought help from American enemies to win an election. He has extorted, attempted to extort American allies. He tried to run a black man in 2020 to siphon off black votes. He embraced insane conspiracies theories. He amplified the

the nuts who came up with them. His campaign tried after the fact to intimidate poll workers. He called the Secretary of State and basically asked him to cheat. I mean, this is Banana Republic stuff. It's crazy, crazy stuff. And I think, I mean, one of the things... And there's so much of it, and it's so overwhelmed the circuits that the sheer totality of it all desensitizes people to the individual acts. And that has been, I think, this room, I hate to say, the secret of his success. Yes, but I think it's a lot of why he has not paid a political price or more of a price than most conventional political actors would have, if taken in isolation, any of those things would be just like eye-bulging emoji, right?

Yeah. I mean, this is one of things that really comes through is, you know, I do this for living. I report on this. I pay a lot of attention to what Donald Trump says and does and did over the past six or seven years. And the number of things that I read in the book that are things either I don't. forgotten or I maybe heard about but didn't pay a ton of attention to it's just it's relentless it's like it's like you know water torture let me let me just end with this question you know the

the taking sort of listeners behind behind the scenes a little bit every big media outlet has pre-written or pre-recorded obituaries for famous people famous politicians famous actors and actresses and then when the person dies, you just sort of pop on the cause of death and a couple of interesting tidbits to freshen it up at the top and then you run the thing. It's why you can put up a 2000 word obit of a major political figure in 20 minutes after the person has been confirmed dead. I have to say that as I read the book, it felt to me like a pre-written obituary for the United States. Did it feel like a written obituary for the United States? Did it feel like a like that reporting it for you? I mean, you use language about the continued viability of our system

and of our country. Did it feel like that when you reported it? That's pretty sobering, Steve. I hadn't thought about that. I don't think Alex had either. But obviously, we were crafting this book as we were living this history. And I think we both share a sort of pessimism about the short-term of viability of the system. And we sort of see of what's happening and we see who is being elected and we see the sort of deeper and deeper silos that people in this country are moving into in terms of the information flow. And it's hard to avoid the reality that, well, this will not pass. And this sort of, this polarization, this tribalism is posing an immense threat to American democracy as we know it. And there's no obvious solution. I mean, that's the thing.

There's just, there's no obvious way to break the fever. We say this in the book, but, you know, most crises in American history had at least some short-term rallying effect. My goodness, the COVID disaster had just the opposite effect. It just deepened the polarization. So how can you be optimistic after you just witnessed a pandemic that killed a million Americans and not and didn't bring folks together, dripping further apart? I think I would stop short of saying obituary, but I think that maybe the comparison I would use is, you know, a person who has been diagnosed with a very severe illness

or has experienced a very severe accident, and they're sort of told by their physician, you know, the good news is that you're going to live, but the bad news is that your life is never going to be the same again, right? That we're going to be living with the consequences of the last few years. forever. And the political culture that we've had in this country, I think, is never going to be what it was when I was 16, which, by the way, was not that great to begin with, right? And, you know, one of the big, I think, tragedies of the last few years, and I think one of the great sort of political miscalculations and surprises the Biden administration was the assumption that once you got rid of Trump, you would have essentially purged the toxin from the system.

Democrats had this great big debate in 2019. Is Trump a symptom or is Trump the disease? And I think it's pretty clear at this point that he is one very, very big symptom, but the underlying issue is not just Donald Trump, and that's not about the change. Well, arguably the most important thing you can have in this kind of a situation is a real sort of fact-based rendering of what's happening, a diagnosis based on the truth and based on facts and history. And that's what you have given us with this book. So again, I highly recommend the book.

Really terrific, really terrific reporting, even if it's sometimes an uncomfortable read that takes us in a direction that causes greater concern. I hope your listeners will pick it up. I encourage all dispatch listeners and readers to pick up a copy. I think you'll like it. I think many of them will. Thank you both for taking the hour to talk to us. Really appreciate it and good luck with the book. Thanks a lot. All right, Hayes. Thanks, pal. See you. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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