The Opinions - Are We in a New Era of Presidential Regalism?

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Who knew what when? Two new books paint a damning portrait of the Democratic Party and what some of its members knew about President Joe Biden’s deteriorating health during the 2024 campaign. On “The Opinions,” the Times editor at large Aaron Retica is joined by the columnist Carlos Lozada to discuss “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson and “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes. Retica and Lozada explore the books’ shared themes and where the beleaguered party goes from here.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Aaron Redica and editor-at-large for the New York Times Opinion section. And I'm joined today by one of our columnist, Carlos Lazada, who is known for his voracious reading and consumption of books. And I'll be honest, I think his analysis of political books offer something that no one else is doing or can do, quite the way he does. So he felt like just the person to talk to this week, given the Biden campaign books that are being published and have already gotten a tremendous amount of attention. Hi, Carlos. Thank you very much for coming. Aaron, good to be with you.

Before we even get into the books themselves, we are talking in the aftermath of the announcement of Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis. And I just want to say, we hope everything goes incredibly well, here's hoping that this does not turn out to be truly devastating. Oh, absolutely. I mean, in moments like these, you just wish the best for the president, for his family, and you've seen the bipartisan expressions of support coming right away following the news of this diagnosis. Okay, so you have just finished reading two new campaign books, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's original Sin, which is the talk of the town. and fight inside the wildest battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parns.

Both of the books are about how a small circle surrounding Joe Biden covered up his mental and physical decline. The funny thing is that one of the reasons that I don't feel completely ghoulish and weird about talking about this in the aftermath of his diagnosis is that these books are really, in a way, not about Biden. they're really about the circles around Biden, by which I mean the inner circle that protected him, but also the outer circle as this rippled out into the Democratic Party and had tremendous impact on the 24 election. So just starting this way, what is the story these two books put together tell about the Democrats campaign in 2024? You know, reading these books reminds me of that old question. about Richard Nixon during the Watergate era that Senator Howard Baker asked in a hearing.

What did the president know? And when did he know it? To me, I'm feeling like a variation on that question now, which is what did the Democrats know about Joe Biden's health? And when did they know it? And that seems to be kind of the overriding theme and question of both these books. I should say that original sin is entirely focused on

that issue, whereas Fight is a more conventional campaign book. It covers the Trump side of the campaign, as well as the Biden and Harris side. But to me, the most interesting parts were those that lingered on this kind of question. And the answer, as in the Nixon era, seems to be that they knew a lot and they knew it pretty early on. And with few exceptions, they didn't do enough about it. So what is going on there? Let's start with the original sin. Tapper and Thompson talked to, you know, I think more than 200 people, mostly after the election. It has lots of details about his decline, including, you know, spectacular moments of not remembering people, including George Clooney, which people have been making a big deal about, but for good reason, right? George Clooney is fairly recognizable.

Yes, one of the most recognizable people on the planet, in fact. So what do you think that taken together these stories point to or give a picture of? Yeah, the power of original sin of this book is not necessarily sort of, you know, its deep incisive analysis. It's this sort of relentless marshalling of examples of instances where you see over time Biden's decline. There were moments when Biden couldn't remember the name of top aides that he worked with for a long time, would lose his train of thought, sounded incoherent sometimes, and would

speak so softly that even with a mic, sometimes people couldn't really understand him. there are a few key examples that to me stand out. In March of 2020, he can't recall the words of the Declaration of Independence. He likes to quote it, and he said something like, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing, right? It almost sounds like Dana Carvey playing Joe Biden. Nice of him to bring women into it, though, Jefferson.

Yeah, yeah. He remembered to be gender-inclusive with the declaration, but then didn't remember, like, the meat of it. You know, there's a moment in 2022 when he's standing by his national security advisor and by his communications director and can't recall their names. He calls Jake Sullivan, Steve, and refers to the communications director as just press because he can't recall her name. You know, so what they're saying really is that what the world saw in that famous disastrous

for Biden debate in June of 2024, where the president revealed himself as severely diminished, was not an anomaly. It was not a bad night. It was not a cold. It was not jet lag. I mean, he may have had those things, but this was something that had been going on for a much longer time. And in fact, they trace it as far back as really to the illness and death of Bo Biden. Who died in 2015, you think, right? Yeah. Some of the people who talked to Tapper and Thompson say that really part of Joe Biden died and never came back then. And other things. say that Hunter Biden's legal troubles, you know, during Joe Biden's presidency, also were another inflection point that caused Joe to take a further turn for the worst. Some people did speak out about this. I mean, famously, you know, Dean Phillips ran against Biden in the primary. David Axelrod, Ari Emanuel, you know, a big donor for the Democrats, spoke out, but not nearly enough Democrats did so. Can we stay with a debate for a second?

So I, of course, was working during the debate. But meanwhile, I was frantically texting with people I know in the Democratic establishment. And there was astonishment, right, in the outside groups. Even people who had been worried about it were still shocked by what happened there. But the book suggests that insider. were not shocked. And if that's true, what were they doing? I just find that amazing.

What you're asking basically is how do you rationalize keeping this veil of ignorance, right, over what was going on with the president? And, you know, it's interesting. I believe it's fight, the book by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes, that begins with a bunch of different people reacting to the debate where they were watching it

and what they thought. And it's a mix of surprise, but it's also this finally caught up with us, that sort of feeling, you know, that this thing they'd been worried about for a long time. But you know what, like here's how you rationalize that, right? Like, so first of all, and this is what you see in both these books, there were some in that inner circle who before had thought, you know what, this is maybe a political vulnerability, but it's not really a problem that will, you know, that is so intense that will hamper his ability to govern. So it was that kind of denial, right? Others are saying, look, even a diminished Biden is better than getting Trump back. And Biden is the only guy that has proven that he can beat Trump. There's a moment in original sin when actually Axelrod had spoken out publicly about Biden's age being a problem.

And he gets this irate call from Ron Clayne, who was Biden's chief of staff. And Clayne sort of chews him out and says, you know, who's going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say that the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it. So think about that logic, right? Like we have to stick with a flawed and deteriorating candidate

precisely because his victory is so important. So, you know, there's a lot of reasons that people rationalized their silence or looked away and it cut up with them in late June of 2024 during that debate. you talk about, the books talk about and you talk about some really, I found them frightening moments where they are not telling the president of the United States the truth. Maybe the most egregious of those is Mike Donilon spinning the polling data to Biden,

giving him the impression that it was close and that he might, might win, effectively insulating him from the truth of how badly things are going. And let's drill in on that a little bit because it's really pretty astounding, right? You were outlining before how essentially power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely, right? But this is like getting into some very weird space. If you're telling the president not just what he wants to hear, but what you think he wants to hear, now that may also be an issue with the Trump administration, and I think it certainly

is. But even so, I found that very damning. Yeah. Late in the campaign, this is even after the debate, right? The inner circle, as you say, especially Mike Donnellan, is telling Biden that, look, this is still competitive. We can get it back into the margin of error in terms of the polling. Even when Biden's own pollsters disagreed, a lot of Democrats were worried that Biden wasn't getting good information about the state of the race. You have Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, you have Barack Obama, you have a lot of people wondering, like, is Joe getting the right information about what's going on? And of course, not having that right information affects his decision-making about, like, what he's going to do, you know, can he stay in the race or not? And Chuck Schumer

meets with Biden in mid-July of 2024. Which is, by the way, weeks after that debate, right? Which is its own scandal. Yeah. And is telling you, him, look, your own pollsters think you have maybe a 5% chance of winning. And Biden's response, I'll just never forget this, he says, really? You know, like he had no idea. So these books are about Democrats in some way keeping the public in the dark about Biden. But it also shows you that they keep Biden in the dark about the public, about how the public was responding and thinking about Biden's candidacy. So that to me just felt like an astonishing moment. That's described in original sin in the Tapper Thompson book. In the Allen and Parns book, there's a moment where they write

that, look, some Biden allies were, in fact, wondering, like, can you really run again? And even worse, they were wondering, is he in good enough shape to continue being president? But their rationale is that, look, if we admit this publicly, then we'll be crushed in November, whether it's Biden or whether it's someone else, like the public won't be able to put up with the fact that we kept this from them. So, like, that logic is so tortured, right? Like, if we admit we can't run the country, they won't let us run the country. And that just shows you how powerful is the pull of partisanship that you end up—and self-delusion. Kind of risking the, you know, putting the fate in the safety of the country at risk. So, Carlos, let's just kind of pull out to the Democrats. Now, there's different

sort of circles here, right? There are the people. who saw him up close. There are the people who were a little further removed. And then there are both the rank-and-file politicians, but also just regular Democratic supporters, all of whom had different access to information here, but also could see what was before their eyes, right? What I want you to talk about is what the books tell us about how the Democratic Party handled this. You just mentioned that the Trump Trump distortion effect that I was talking about before was creating this twisted logic to just keep going, keep going, keep going, even though many people knew it was a mistake.

So walk us through culpability here. How do we think about that? This trust issue about the Democrats, right, this is not just an idle question about what should Biden have done, how should they have handled it, right? because this is about fundamentally, can we trust these people? Well, first off, there were many different circles. There were people who saw him all the time. There were people who saw him infrequently.

And, you know, that's a tricky question, right? Because sometimes you think, like, oh, if you see him all the time, then the deterioration should be obvious to you. But often it was people who saw him less frequently, you know, like months apart. It's like when you go to a college reunion, you haven't seen these people in ages and they look like hell. This is a similar thing

and that often people who hadn't seen them in a while were more shocked. To me, it sort of cuts both ways. No one emerges with clean hands here. A bigger question that Democrats are grappling with at large is about trust.

As you say, like, if they kept this from us, how can you trust the leadership of this party? And there's an assumption in these books, I think, especially in the Tapper and Thompson book, that, you know, if Biden had, quote, done the right,

thing, right? If he'd decided against seeking re-election, or even if he had sought it but gotten out earlier, that things would be better for the Democrats. You know, they say he handed the election to Trump. And they quote people like David Plough, you know, the Obama guy who worked also on the Harris campaign saying this was all Biden's fault. Biden screwed the Democratic Party. But I wonder if blaming Biden for everything is a little too tempting, too simple for the Democrats? Say he had exited, stage left, earlier. You know, would the Democrats have won the day? You know, it's not hard to imagine them, like, ripping themselves apart in that mini primary if they've had one. Maybe any Democratic nominee would have struggled mightily under the weight of the Biden

record on inflation and the border, right? And, you know, there's been lots of talk about, you know, anti-incumbent forces around the world that could have come for the Democrats, too, you know, whether it was Biden or Harris or Whitmer or Shapiro or Buttigieg or Newsom or like, insert your fantasy Democrat here. The trust problem the Democrats have is wrapped up in an identity problem. I'm not talking about identity politics. I just mean like who the Democrats are. For a decade now, they've defined themselves as the anti-Trump party.

And they've been explaining what they're against, but not really explaining what they're for. Typically, you do that during primaries, right? That's the clarifying moment. You hash out your policy debates, you define yourselves ideologically. But the Democrats haven't done that. In 2020, Biden did not win the battle of ideas in the Democratic Party. He got the nomination because he was familiar and comfortable and not Bernie Sanders. And that bet paid off.

The Democrats won the White House. And they thought they could do it again. And then four years later, when Biden finally gives up on his dreams of re-election, the party again passed up the chance to determine where it stood. It just handed the baton to the closest outstretched hand. Harris's campaign for all the opportunity economy stuff, it was about Trump. You know, it was that I know his type. But the thing is, American voters also knew his type.

It's less clear what they make of the Democrats. Biden's victory in 2020 allowed Democrats to paper over their differences. And his implosion in 2024 is letting them do it again. But I think until the party is able to offer something more than just fervent anti-Trumpism, they're going to struggle. There's a brutal line in that. Alan and Parns book, right, where they say that Biden had originally offered himself as a bridge to the next generation of democratic leadership, but then they say that he was a bridge from one

Trump term to the next. So, of course, it's easy to say, and I don't disagree with you, that it's important for them to define themselves outside of the question of being the anti-Trump party. But you can understand in a way why they do it right, because being the anti-Trump party allows them to be a coalition that embraces their left, their left of center, their center, and even their sort of remaining few, you know, yellow dog Democrats got on right of center. And we don't know what they can come up with that would bridge all of that. The anti-Trump idea does bring all that under one umbrella.

I'm sure it's good for fundraising. It's, you know, it's, yes, it absolutely does. But it hasn't necessarily worked out for them. You know, let's not forget, Biden defeated Trump in 2020. He batted back the threat to the soul of the nation. But even during the Biden presidency, it still felt like the Trump era, right? Trump was still sucking all the oxygen out of the room, out of our politics. I don't feel that that respite that we supposedly got really changed that.

And you're right, that is the challenge for the Democrats, but it's also very seductive for them to just continue defining themselves in this one way. That brings us to an interesting aspect of the two books, right? The polling showed that people, voters, including Democrats, really were worried about him being old, that he was too old to run for a second term. And yet, somehow, in high-end democratic circles, they ignored that, which I, you know, they're all polling obsessed. So I find it bizarre that they had the evidence in front of them in the form of polls. They had the evidence in front of them in terms of Biden's public appearances, never mind his private appearances, which not everyone had access to until the June debate. But the issue is, and this is the way I always put it, like when the kitchen table conversation is so different from the public or the national conversation, you're in trouble. Do you think that there are things you can draw out of the books or out of putting them together that help us understand how the Democrats should be communicating with voters?

First of all, the public, you're right, was way ahead of the political class. like they had tuned in to this problem, to this concern they had, well before the debate, certainly. And that really suggests a kind of disdain for public opinion. They relied on the easy and overused disinformation and misinformation argument. And Tapper and Thompson say that, look, what the public saw in the public eye was bad, what was going on behind closed doors was even worse. So the crazy thing about this,

right, is that in a way, all of this information was available, right? This is not a problem of people not knowing, even though there are veils. But there were plenty of people writing all along saying that maybe he shouldn't run. But what happens here is that there's almost a, it makes the campaign book itself into a strange genre. You and I are both connoisseurs of a way. We have read our share. Of these kind of campaign books. And I want to talk a little bit about that to bring things to a close.

Alan and Parns have written, this is, I think, the third of a series of books about the campaigns. But, I mean, this is not, you know, fear and loathing on the campaign trail, right? This is not the boys on the bus. This is not, you know, what it takes, the Richard Ben Kramer book. because they are peculiarly about someone who was not in the end, the candidate. Right. So how does that change how it all looks when you're reading it? There are a few standard type of campaign books, right?

There are books by the politicians and books by the journalists. The politicians write books before campaigns, which are eminently forgettable. The politicians who lose tend to write books after, and those are far more interesting. I hear Kamala Harris is writing a book. I will go out on a limb and say that the book, looking back on the 2024 race, will be much better than the truths we hold. The book she wrote when she was starting to run for president back in 2019. So the journalists write books about the campaign that was, you know, the key moments, the primaries, the conventions, the gaffes, the scandals, the infighting among strategists. That's always a big thing in the campaign books.

and the voters and the polls. What is interesting about a book like Original Sin, for instance, is that they're focused on a campaign that was and then that suddenly wasn't. The Biden campaign, even though he wasn't the eventual nominee, I think will always be as or more interesting than either the Trump or Harris campaigns. This kind of weird moment we had where a sitting president had already won the primary, you know, was campaigning, was raring to go, and suddenly is made to withdraw, makes for a very unique kind of book where you can focus on something so specific like Tapper and Thompson have done with original sin. And one more thing to remember about these books is that I think they come out much, much quicker than they used to.

So focusing on just one thing sometimes is not just a virtue, but a necessity. People often point to what it takes by Richard Ben Kramer as kind of the ultimate campaign book. What people forget is that that was a book about the 1988 campaign that came out in 1992. Right? That's how long... An astonishing section on Joe Biden, by the way. Oh, which I think people need to read now. It's actually great because it discusses how when he was a young man running in his first Senate race, he was concerned about being too mean

to the old guy he was running against who was in his 60s. But I think, you know, these books come out very soon now after the campaigns and that's a virtue and that you want information quickly. But it's also a hindrance

because it really limits what authors can do. And perhaps it's a reflection that publishers and authors believe that our attention spans are so short that we need the information right now or we're going to lose all interest and forget about this entire. Let me sneak in one thought.

If Trump is introducing a kind of, this is not a word, but regalism, like kingliness to being president this time around, the drama surrounding Biden's decision first to run, then to stay, then to go, is, again, much more regal than presidential, right? It's not about coalitions. It's not about, let me count all the people who are going to. to vote for us and figure out how we're going to get there. It's about a small circle of people, you know, much more like a Shakespeare play than the campaign books I was referring to earlier, right? Because there are these fateful decisions that are much more like the ones you would see in a historical play than you would in a campaign book, which I find very interesting. It's like about how our politics is changing, even though it's hard to see it when it's happening in front of

us. One of these books talks about how the Biden administration was run as a sort of board of directors, like a very small number of people actually had great influence. And it wasn't like the president was the most influential. He was just one more member of the board, maybe the most senior member. And that does speak to that sort of, I mean, what what you call regal, someone else could just say, is extremely insular. And that's certainly one of the themes that emanates from reading this books about the Biden side of this race. Carlos, thank you so much for coming out to talk to me about this today. Delighted. Let's do it again.

If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaka, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzik. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski.

The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.