The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Was Biden’s Decline a Cover-Up? — with Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Scott has a conversation with Jake Tapper, anchor of "The Lead" on CNN and the network’s chief Washington correspondent, and Alex Thompson, national political correspondent for Axios and a CNN contributor.  They discuss their new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.  Scott also opens the episode by addressing the controversy surrounding the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Episode 349. 349 is the area code serving the Mexican state of Jalisco. In 1949, NATO was formed. What does a Scotsman say when he loses a digit on his foot? NATO. Yeah, we're reaching. Go, go, go! Yeah, we're reaching.

Go, go, go! Welcome to the 349th episode of The Prop Gpod. What's happening? Okay, in today's episode, wow, has this blown up into something we weren't thinking? Jake Tapper, anchor of the lead on CNN and the network chief Washington correspondent and Alex Thompson, national political correspondent for Axios and CNN contributor are on the pod. They're the co-authors of a new book, Original Sin, which unpacks what they call the defining mistake of the 2024 election. President Biden's decision to run for reelection followed by a concerted effort to hide his cognitive decline.

Let's talk about the timeline and what's gone on here. I find this fascinating. Biden officially dropped out of the race on July 21st, 2024. I wanna say I'm the original ageist. I said I'm Bill Marr where he responded, you're an ageist. And I said, yeah, so is biology.

I called, I said that it was fucking ridiculous that Biden was running for reelection and also ridiculous that Donald Trump was running for election. Our prefrontal cortex begins to degrade at the age of 40 and we take driver's licenses away from people. We don't let them be pilots. Most CEOs and most of Western nations are asked to retire at 65 and yet we've decided that people who are even past what is the life expectancy in the United States can have their finger on the button.

This is a very taxing button. We absolutely need age limits on the top end as we do on the bottom end. But anyways, here is some receipts for me being the original ageist. What a thrill. On July 11th, I said on this very podcast that it was time for him to step down. And let's be honest, America is the most impressive country in the world. We need to mature the most impressive person in the party to lead the Democratic Party and be the front line.

And that is not the president. Okay, then again on pivot with Kara Swisher just days before he exited the race. A few weeks ago, there was a general sense that the destabilization and the risks of removing Biden for a lot of people were not worth it. And then as there was additional scrutiny and he was forced to go off teleprompter and do live stuff, quite frankly, it just it just cemented, confirmed, validated everyone's worst fears. And I wrote about it even earlier in our news letter, No Mercy, No Malice, on July 5th. I believe President Biden will announce

he is withdrawing from the 2024 race imminently. Anyway, the book has really stirred controversy, not because of what the book reveals, but because of when it was released, just days after the news broke about Biden's cancer diagnosis. So this conversation with Jake and Alex was recorded before this kind of controversy hit it. I think a lot of this is that people feel that Jake and Alex accidentally are sort of

dancing on the grave or the early grave of a man who has devoted his life to the US. I think a lot of this is that people are just upset about the fact that Democrats lost to an insurrectionist and are looking for a target for their anger. And I think Jake and Alex got in the way. But this was an honest and thoughtful conversation. There's also criticism, especially toward Jake, that he knew about Biden's decline and is now trying to profit from it with his book. Look, they're trying to make it sound more scandalous

than it probably was. It was, I don't think cover-up is the right term. If they were truly trying to cover Biden's cognitive decline, they would have never allowed him to debate. Trump decided not to debate after it was clear he didn't have the cognitive abilities to go toe-to-toe with Vice President Harris.

He looked stupid, flat-footed, and quite frankly, old. And they decided to hide him. They let President Biden out. So we all knew this. I mean, this was kind of an open secret. And if you have aging parents, you know that you're not covering up for them, but you're accidental co-conspirators.

This was naive. It was stupid. It was irresponsible for the people around him and his family, and him, quite frankly, to let this go as long as it did. I believe that had the primary process, which is this unbelievable process that matures not only the right person, but the right person for the moment, I think we would have handed Trump his ass and we wouldn't have an insurrectionist who is engaging in the greatest grift in the history of a Western economy right now.

But the reason we have a quote unquote person who is found guilty on 34 counts of sexual abuse by a jury of his peers, which includes many Republicans, the reason why that person won is because of not this cover up, but this naivete, this ignorance, and this poor judgment of President Biden and his family. And we have to reckon with that. And also the Democratic Party who decided not to have, my recommendation was that we have a compressed

sort of all hands shark tank, like primary, with multiple debates and try and mature the best person. Because no one had heard of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, but the primary process on both sides tends to mature amazing candidates. And we decided that we were gonna stick our heads in the sand and believe that someone who didn't make it to Iowa

was in the previous election was the right person to take the mantle after basically Biden was threatened with getting embarrassed day by day when it became very obvious that he was in no shape whatsoever to run for president again. So this is something that we all engage in because we all love our aging parents and our family. We see them at their best. So you can absolutely understand

how they would make excuses. This is a guy who was pushing back on Russia, who stood up to send immediately deployed aircraft carrier strike forces to the Mediterranean and told Iran to sit the fuck down. I don't think he gets enough credit for that. Passed a ton of meaningful legislation. I mean this guy you could see why people would say look he's lost a step but he surrounds himself with really talented people and

he's the best thing for the country. You can absolutely see that argument. And again we all engage in this if you have aging parents in what is not a coverup, but a tendency to enable, rationalize, and not see the forest for the trees. When you're inside of the bottle, it's really hard to read the label. What's the recommendation here? What's the learning? The learning is we need age limits, folks. We have decided a 34-year-old doesn't have the judgment or the experience to run for

the land's highest office, then someone at 75 old doesn't have the judgment or the experience to run for the land's highest office than someone at 75 probably doesn't have the cognitive faculties or the judgment or quite frankly, it's just not as robust and presents too much of a health risk. What if president Biden was president right now? My guess is he would probably still, he probably wouldn't handle the reins and the reins over to vice president Harris. He'd still think that he could handle everything. And we would have a nation that is somewhat in chaos or a little bit leaderless and Pennsylvania. wouldn't handle the reins, hand the reins over to Vice President Harris. He'd still think that he could handle everything.

And we would have a nation that is somewhat in chaos or a little bit leaderless in Pennsylvania Avenue. I still think that would be better than what we have, but that's absolutely what we shouldn't do. We need age limits. Also, it's the kinder thing to do. It's the kindest thing to do because a lot of these people feel like when they give up their profession, that they're essentially going home to die. And actually there's some truth to that. that mortality rates increase when you stop working.

But when you have a mandatory retirement age, as they do for the Supreme Court in the UK, and they do across many corporations and in many government positions around the world, it creates, it gets rid of the anxiety. It's the kind thing to do. It's the right thing to do. It's the best thing for the nation. So rather than playing in a blame game and getting angry for Jake and Alex, for trying to promote their book rather than blaming the Biden family, we can absolutely, or the people around them, we can absolutely, in my opinion, see how this happened. Anyway, so with that, here's our conversation with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Jake, where does this podcast find you? I am at Penn Law School where my dad and CJ Rice and I just did a seminar on criminal

justice. I don't know if you know the CJ Rice story, but my dad and then slightly me helped get an innocent man out of prison. That's nice. That must be rewarding to be able to work with your father. Yeah, it was pretty cool. That's great. And Alex, where does this boncast find you?

I'm in DC in my apartment. That's not nearly as cool a story. Jake wins. Jake is winning so far. I didn't get anyone out of prison, didn't do anything, just my apartment with too many books. All right, let's bust right into it. Your new book, Original Sin,

explores what you call the original sin of the 2024 election, President Biden's decision to seek reelection followed by a full-scale effort to conceal his cognitive decline throughout the campaign. I'll start with a bunch of theses because Jake knows this, but Alex doesn't. This podcast is just basically an excuse for me

to talk about me and my views. My sense is that I read this book called What It Takes, and it covered, I think, the 84 election and all the candidates, and it basically wrote a 100-page biography on all the candidates. One of them was Biden. 88, but yeah. It was 88, thank you, Jake.

Jake, it's my fucking podcast, don't correct me. You may be a big swinging dick at CNN, but I don't put up with that shit here. So look, after reading that book, the takeaway I had from Biden was that he was a raging narcissist. And when I look at Dianne Feinstein or Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

you know, this has really plagued us, was this narcissism that these people don't want to acknowledge that maybe they aren't up to the job. Your thoughts on, I mean, at the end of the day, he decided to stay in. Wasn't this, wasn't he infected with narcissism? I've even heard now that he's reflecting, but he's not reflecting on his mistake.

He's reflecting on whether he would have won. Biden, narcissism that was bad for the country, put himself before the country. Dots. You know, it's interesting that you reference what it takes, because Joe Biden liked his portrayal in what it takes. In fact, he had the researcher of what it takes write both of his memoirs,

ghostwrite both of his memoirs. I agree with you that he didn't totally understand the portrayal and some of the damning parts of it. And I do think that Joe Biden, especially in 2022, early 2023, sort of saw himself as an indispensable man, right? The world's on fire, Putin's on the march, and he can save it in its own way. It's his own version of I alone can fix it. I'm curious, Jake, what you think when, and I have the receipts here, but very early on, I'm like, this guy's too old,

and that also that Vice President Harris would make a great Supreme Court injustice and a terrible candidate. This is someone who didn't make it to Iowa and in the previous campaign. And I started getting text messages from some of the people we both know saying, Scott, do you not understand the assignment here?

You're about to get Trump re-elected. And quite frankly, and I'm not proud of this, I acquiesced. I signed up because I was so scared of a Trump re-election and everyone convinced me this was the only path forward. I'm curious what your experience was with that. A, did you register that same kind of pressure? And what was the behind the scenes kind of arm twisting

across the media powerful or elite? You're right that there is this huge pressure of what's wrong with you. Do you want Trump in this Manichaean world, like the Manichaean world, the idea that we're supposed to be on one side or the other. And if you are criticizing Joe Biden for anything, you obviously are mega. criticizing Joe Biden for anything. You obviously are mega. I went through that, uh, in 2020, uh, more in 2021, when I provided very critical coverage of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Um, and I think they just always thought I was a pain in the ass that it didn't bother me as much, which is not to say that I covered in retrospect the aging and cognition issue as much as I wish I had knowing now what Alex and I were able to learn after the election, interviewing more than 200 mostly Democratic insiders on stuff that they wouldn't talk to us about until the election was over. I do think that there is a degree of media complicity that we can talk about, but the bottom line really is that President Biden, his family, and his top aides lied. They lied to the press, they lied to the public, they lied to their own cabinet secretaries, they lied to White House staffers. They lied to Democratic elected officials.

And it was a lie made evident to the world. Well, first of all, I mean, as you know, the public was long skeptical of his ability to do this job, but it was a lie that was. Almost unrefutable, irrefutable after the June 27th debate. So while I can point to any number of individuals, including myself and every single human being outside the White House who wasn't constantly shouting about this, the emperor has no clothes,

I do think at the end of the day, the man that you called a narcissist and his support network, his inner circle, are chiefly responsible for this lie's strength as long as it existed. Alex, I'm curious, I remember thinking, where's his wife? It just, you know, when you think about your family

and their role, you trust them, you know they have your best interests at heart. I'm curious if you have any inside, you know, information or knowledge here or reporting around what first lady Biden's role was or was not in this process. You know, Jill Biden used to be a reluctant political spouse. You know, in 2004, she has the story where she literally walked into a political meeting that was about Biden running for president in 2004

with a no and a sharpie written on her stomach while she was in a bikini. She's like strode through the meeting. Subtle. Yeah. Who hasn't done that? like strode through the meeting. Yeah. Who hasn't done that?

That changes. And starting in like 2017, 2018, 2019, she becomes not just, you know, an unwilling political specialist, she becomes an enthusiastic and, and in, in a huge part of his political decision making and operation, her chief aide becomes a deputy campaign manager on the 2020 effort, very unusual for the aide to a spouse to have that sort of role. He

then also becomes one of the most powerful people in the White House. He's vetting certain aides. He's often vetting people for loyalty. He had enormous control over the schedule and would often say, oh, you know, say, oh, you know, the first lady is not going to like this. They could throw that around a lot of the time. So the combination of the two of them had enormous power in the White House. And there was this feeling that even though he was 80 and was about to run for reelection, none of the senior people in the White House got in his face and said, maybe we shouldn't do this. And part of the reason, now that I think speaks to their own lack of

courage, but part of the reason was that this environment had been set up, and I think Jill was an indispensable part of this, of where loyalty was the first virtue and most important virtue. And if you questioned, then it automatically got to the First Lady and then that would get back to Joe. So I think that was part of how she pushed. And I think if you watch his appearance on The View the other week, I think you can see how she took her role as a loving spouse and protector, and how it went to lengths that eventually became, you know, covering up for his deficiencies. Well, somebody close to the family told us that of all the mottos, hear about, my word is a Biden, et cetera, et cetera, but there's one that Joe Biden doesn't share on the stump.

It's crude. It's never call a fat person fat. And what it means is not please be polite. It's don't point out ugly truths. And this is a family motto that might not be on the family, the Biden family crest, but it explains a lot. It explains why they lied to the public about Bo and his health, why they were in denial about Hunter's condition and their daughter's condition, both of them struggling with addiction. It's the lie of Joe Biden cares about his family more than he cares about his own ambition.

It's not true. Probably not true for most presidents, if not all presidents, but there is a belief in the mythology of Joe Biden that for his family and closest aides becomes not just a mythology, it becomes a theology. And like any theology, skeptics are not welcome. And that's one of the ways that they got to the place where they were putting Joe Biden ahead of everything. They believed that he was the singular man who could save NATO and protect Ukraine, protect the country from Donald Trump. Just such a denial of realities. Don't call a fat person fat.

To the point that ultimately the whole country was like, okay, this can't go on anymore. We've never seen anything like this before. So you talked to 200 people. What were some of the, give us a few of the most surprising findings that were sort of like, whoa. There's so many. The fact that in December, 2022,

he couldn't come up with the name, in the middle of the day, he couldn't come up with the name of his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, or his communications director, Kate Bedingfield. He called Jake Steve and he called Kate Press. The fact that behind the scenes, as far back as April 2023, he was having moments where

Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley of Illinois saw him and it reminded him of his father who had passed away from Parkinson's. That's to the extent of how debilitated he seemed. The fact that they had the last cabinet meeting that they had in almost a year in October 2023, and then cabinet secretaries told us that the White House kept them at bay, didn't allow them to see him. And that in the intervening time, one of the cabinet secretaries had a meeting with him, and he seemed disoriented and not with it. Other cabinet secretaries told us that, you know, that legendary test of a president, can he manage the emergency 2 a.m. phone call?

No, they didn't think he could by the end of his presidency. All of this. But honestly, like literally, when I was doing the audio book, after every chapter, I would just say, holy shit, I still can't believe this. Alex and I reported this and I still can't believe it. I mean, I would also just add to that, he didn't recognize George Clooney. One of the most famous people in the world, someone else that he had a relationship with, who had, when he was in the Senate

as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clooney was involved in that. They'd known each other for a long time. And at that fundraiser in June of 2024, an aide had to be like, you remember George? And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then George Clooney. And that moment is the seed to eventually George Clooney writing that op-ed. is the seed to eventually George Clooney writing that op-ed. And I think that was just sort of a stunning revelation and the fact that it's what sort of compelled Clooney to speak out. I'm hearing from all of these senior level people or governors, many of whom some served in the administration, and when people reach out to me, and they quote, unquote,

they say, I'd love to get your views on something, which is Latin for I'm running for president and want to come on your podcast. And it strikes me that one of the biggest missed opportunities was in as elegant and kind a way possible for someone like Governor Newsom or Secretary Buttigieg to say, look, I adore the man, but I'm running for president.

And it just struck me that nobody did. Well, Dean Phillips did. But yeah, no major character did. I had Representative Phillips on the pod, I think a lot of him. And I think he's going to be a great representative. I just don't think he had much of a shot there. I don't think he was much of a, I don't think he was a great representative. I just don't think he had much of a shot there. I don't think he was much of a, I don't think he was a credible candidate.

I mean, I don't want to say they're to blame, but didn't they, it just struck me. It got so bad at the end. What was it? Was it they thought they would immediately render their future ambitions less likely because the democratic machine would remember their lack of loyalty.

It just felt like there was such a vacuum for someone to just raise their hand and say, love the guy, we'll support him if he's a nominee, but I'm throwing my hat in the ring. How come that didn't happen? It's a great question. I think that first of all, he was incumbent president, and that's very difficult to do and usually when you do that

whether you are Pat Buchanan or Ted Kennedy you are tarred with the disloyal label that said there were efforts to try to get a Pritzker or a Whitmer or a Newsom to run, Bill Daley, the former Obama White House Chief of Staff, tried to get them to.

Dean Phillips tried to get them to before he became a nominee. We have a whole chapter on Congressman Phillips. And the truth of the matter is, you know, you read this book, there's not a lot of courage. There's not a lot of risk. And that's a risky venture to say, I'm going to challenge the incumbent president. What I wonder more than that is, where was the group of Democrats?

Parties are so weak these days, but where was the DNC chair, Democratic leader of the Senate, Democratic leader of the House to say, look, you are historically unpopular, and beyond that, you're having moments that I think that you should think about retiring and going out on top, but they didn't do that either. And in fact, even towards the end, the only person we could find who directly told President Biden, I don't think you should run again, was Chuck Schumer at the very, very end,

one week before he dropped out. Even the Nancy Pelosi's and Barack Obama's, Hakeem Jeffries did not directly say it. They would say things like, we just wanna make sure you have all the access to all the information, you need all the polling information. I don't know that Joe Biden would have ever dropped out

no matter what. I think he only dropped out at the very, very end because he had to, it would have been a disaster, it would have been a bloody convention. But that said, yeah, nobody really acquits themselves very well in this. I was under the impression of relationship between him and Obama was very strained and that Obama saw the writing on the wall, but, but president Biden had already sort of shut them out.

Is that true? Yes. And Obama is very aware of that, which is why despite I think some of the narrative that Obama was the one that pushed Biden out, he was involved, but he was aware enough of Biden's resentments that he was wary of seeming involved because he knew it would just make Biden dig in more. And the reason the relationship is strained, there's two reasons. One's political, one's personal.

One is that Biden and the people around him have never gotten over that Obama favored Hillary as the successor rather than Biden in 2016. He wrote about it in his memoir, but it's still something that enrages them that Obama never took me seriously. I never got, you know, never gave me the full credit. And there's a personal one too, and Hunter Biden's ex-wife,

now ex-wife, is very good friends with Michelle Obama. It's why Michelle Obama resisted campaigning for Joe Biden in 2020. It didn't get much noticed because of COVID, and it's also why she was resistant to campaigning for him in 2024. That relationship, there is a rift there.

Now the Obama people will be like, we like Joe. We don't have any resentments. The resentments mostly seem to be on the Biden side toward the Obamas. Give us some insight into the relationship. My thesis has always been that, you know, competition and politics make strange bedfellows, but I've always felt that the reason Vice President Harris, who was an immensely qualified person, but the reason she got the nod to be the vice president was because she called the President

Biden a racist on a debate stage. So they thought of her as a fighter. I don't think so. I know that almost, I think that almost cost her the nomination because Jill Biden was so resentful of it. At the end of the day, he had, he had promised he would pick a woman vice president. He never promised he would pick an African American woman vice president. He said he'd pick an African American woman, Supreme court justice, but it kind of became this thing after George Floyd and the protests there that he felt like he had to pick a black woman, it really at the end of the day

truly came down to Kamala Harris, who had been in the view of the Biden team, vetted on a national stage because she had been a candidate for president, even though as you point out, she didn't even make it to 2020, much less Iowa. And even though they were publicly talking about people like Congresswoman Karen Bass, who's now the mayor of Los Angeles, and Congresswoman Val Demings from Florida, those two weren't really in the final two.

It was Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Kamala Harris. Biden liked Whitmer more. He had more affection for her, saw her as more of a Biden Democrat type from a gritty, Midwestern state. But at the end of the day, just the image of him with Kamala Harris, who was of the progressive left at that point, even though she really previously had been more of a moderate in California, African American woman vetted, had gone after him in the debate. And so there were people on the staff who thought, well, this shows that he's like bigger than that sort of thing. But Jill Biden really, really resented her.

And while president Biden and Kamala Harris, I think developed a genuine warmth, theirs was not the partnership of a Bush and Cheney or a Clinton and Gore, or an Obama and Biden. She was relegated to lesser tasks. The team never really thought of her as the heir apparent until the very end. In fact, they would use her as an excuse as to why Biden couldn't step down.

Do you want Kamala to be the nominee? You know, she's less popular than Biden. Which enraged other Democrats because it was like you picked her. Some people in the Biden world have quipped actually the original sin was picking her because they felt that she was not ready or was not electable. But at the end of the day, that was their choice and it was picking a vice president is

one of the most consequential choices presidential uh, you know, presidential candidate faces. What color or insight can you provide on the relationship between President Biden and Vice President Harris so the public may not, may not have that nuance? You know, there was a little bit of strain, you know, Jake spoke to some of this, but, you know, the way that Biden would call her a kid, right? Like Like I think Kamala Harris, according to people around her, they thought, she thought of herself as a peer. And Biden saw her as a kid and someone that had been really good friends with his late son, Bo Biden, when they were both state attorneys general.

And even on the staff level is where the tension really was, where the Biden team didn't think she was very good, thought she was creating headaches for them all the time, was not, and also didn't think she was like a very nice person. And to Jake's point, they used that dim view of her to rationalize running you know, running for re-election. Which is twisted because as you know, it's got the, they could have made her a Supreme Court justice, right? They could have said at some point when that position came open,

we're gonna make you a Supreme Court justice and you know, if you want to resign from the court and run for president in the future, that's on you. But we got to put somebody who we think can actually be vice president and actually be president, if need be. And she probably, let's be honest, I mean, she's certainly not the legal mind that Katanji Brown Jackson is, but she would have been confirmed. She's a senator. She's a former attorney general of California. The US Senate is a fairly, they love to sniff each other. I mean, you know, a senator is good enough for any position. So I think she would have been confirmed. This is all Earth 2 stuff, but if they really didn't think she was qualified, there was an out right there. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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column NA, and of all bank and trust members, FDIC. The I.O. card is issued by Patriot Bank member FDIC pursuant to a license from MasterCard. Listen, I get it, naming a streaming service is hard. There's a lot to choose from, most of the words are nonsensical, but there is simply no excuse for the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery got rid of the name HBO, one of the best brands in television, only to decide a few years later that oh, actually, it should have been called HBO Max all along.

This week on The Vergecast, we talk about how this branding disaster at HBO came to be and what might happen next. Plus, everything happening at ESPN, the future of Fox, and what happens if you get ants in your Sonos speaker. All that and more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. Try and put us in the room. What was the moment that you said, okay, it's over? I mean, what was, to me, you said a threat of a chaotic election.

I was under the impression that Speaker Pelosi or somebody had said, every day I'm going to have Democrats come out against you, and it's going to be humiliating for you. That didn't happen. No. So it's very complicated. So I mean, there is this impression that it was this grand plan with Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and Obama pulling strings and deciding things. But no, it was much more organic than that.

Pelosi and Schumer both got members of their caucus to hold off on calling for him to step down at different times and wielded those public, the threat of more public calls for him to step down as a threat to get things, to get, that's how Schumer got a meeting with the Biden White House and campaign leadership by saying, if you don't do this, I got six senators who are ready to come out right now. And so they did that meeting.

But at the very end, after a drumbeat of House Democrats on their own coming out, and by the end, I think it was something like 40, which is really kind of a small number when you think about how many of them actually wanted them to step down. And it was pretty organic. The Biden people were still in denial. But what I think changed the equation was you have Chuck Schumer goes to visit the president in Delaware. He has to threaten that he's going to call for the meeting if they don't give it to him publicly. So they say, if you don't give it to me, I'm going to call for it. You're going to have to give it to me. So let me come and visit him. He goes and visits him. This is after Pelosi and

Jeffries have both made it clear to Biden, the House Democratic caucus doesn't want him to be the nominee anymore. And they think they're going to lose. Not, they're not going to be able to recapture the house and that they're worried that he's not getting the polling data that they're getting. Schumer goes there and he says, he tells that he tells Biden about the meeting that the, uh, the house, the Senate Democrats have had with the campaign leadership, which Schumer had told. Biden's top aides, Mike Donilon and Steve Vershetti, tell the president every detail of this.

And then it got back to Schumer that they hadn't. So that's why he called for the private meeting. He went there and he basically said, of the 51-member Senate Democratic caucus, there are five who want you to stay as the nominee. And that meant a lot to Joe Biden personally, because at that point, by the way, I think only one had publicly called for him to not be the nominee anymore. I think Senator Welsh from Vermont, they were all holding back, but a number of them were very worried, especially the ones up for reelection.

So that was a deciding factor. Also, one week later, when Biden was very sick with COVID, and I can't imagine what it was like for an 81-year-old man who's insisting on his health and vigor to have been laid up with COVID in isolation, Rashadi and Donilon meet with them and they tell him something that hasn't been reported until this book, which is the woman running the Democratic National Convention, which was about three weeks away, was a woman named Mignon Moore, long-time respected democratic operative. When she got the job in 2023, she formed an ad hoc committee called the What If Committee. Not on the books, but it was just a group of maybe a dozen or so people involved in

the convention. And it was, what if the protests in Chicago turn out to be like the protests in the 68 convention? What if Joe Biden's no longer the nominee? What if this? What if that? After the debate, they started regularly reaching out to the delegates. And they were hearing from the delegates how much bleeding there was going on.

And the what-if committee told Reschetti and Donilon, if you go to the convention, if the president takes this to the convention, he can still win, but it will be ugly and it will be close. So all of this data, you don't have the support of the senators. It's going to be an ugly battle. Schumer had also told Biden what Donalyn Ricchetti had not, which is your poll, your own pollsters don't think you can win.

They think there's a 5% chance that you can win. And that is not what Donalyn had been telling the president. Donalyn was the—the pollsters never talked to Biden. They would talk to Donalyn andchetti and Donilon would interpret the information and he's still interpreting it out there. You hear him at Harvard, the Harvard Institute of Politics talking about it was only a two-point race, etc., etc. Just absolute nonsense. Anyway, I think at the end of the day, a very sick Biden saw the writing on the wall, saw that the only way he was going to win the nomination was with a hideous convention.

None of the Democrats in the House, none of the Democrats in the Senate, I'm using none loosely, but few, few in the Democrats in the House, few in the Democrats in the Senate wanted him to be the nominee. And he just saw the writing on the wall. But it took three excruciating weeks.

Just from a spectator standpoint, it sounds like it would have been such great theater if he'd stuck up the middle finger and said, no, I'm going to the convention, I'm going to be the nominee. All hell breaks loose at the convention. And let's assume he didn't get it. I'm curious, so with the two of you just speculating, trying to game theory it out, who do you think were the likely, who would have emerged from a contested convention or a bloody convention?

Who do you think most likely would have emerged victorious if Biden had decided to go the distance but didn't end up the nominee? It's such an interesting question because how does Biden brawling, how does it affect Kamala Harris? And does Kamala Harris stick with him completely until the end? When does she break, if at all? And does that sour her chances? Now,

black woman is a demographic with the most loyal voting bloc in the Democratic Party. And it was made very clear, we have some reporting that many of the black leaders of the party were like, you're not going to step, you know, you're not going to pass over the first black one vice president. So she had the inside track, but given the connection to Biden, if he went to the convention, it would have been that that could have actually sunk her. After that, you have to look, you know, there was already sort of like what I called in 2023, the Justin Case primary. You know, Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer,

were all very subtly, laying track, Justin Case. I think J.B. Pritzker, given the fact that the convention was in Chicago, the fact that he's a billionaire and has a ton of money and would have said, I'm going to spend a billion dollars to beat Trump. I guess in my Aaron Sorkin, I actually somehow think that he could have pulled it off. Now Newsom is like a great political athlete. It'd been interesting to see if he could rally enough delegates, but I think the combination

of it being Chicago and the fear of Trump would have made them go with a little bit of a less risky option. So your money would have been on Pritzker? Yes. That's really interesting. So this is a corpus that, you know, that through their machination and process and infrastructure decided to keep Biden, and that's the Democratic Party. What does this say about the shortcomings of the Democratic Party? And if they engage the two of you, and I'm sure they've asked you this question,

what needs to change about the Democratic Party in terms of its ability to mature or gestate the best candidate to win the election? What changes, what does this reflect about the Democratic machinery and what needs to change? or gestate the best candidate to win the election. What changes, what does this reflect about the democratic machinery and what needs to change? The last election that I can think of, the last primary election that I can think of

where Democrats actually allowed the democratic voters to pick the nominee was 2008 when they picked Barack Obama. And remember the consensus, the Democratic leadership consensus was kind of Hillary Clinton, but there were a number of Democratic candidates that were strong. And ultimately Iowa voters picked Obama,

New Hampshire voters picked Hillary, and then South Carolina voters picked Obama, and you know, but it was a very competitive primary and it was legit It was legitimate primary. It was contested. It was ugly they had to have a uh A meeting of the the two candidates when it was over, etc, etc 2012 obviously the incumbent democrat wins

2016 the dnc is all in for Hillary uh, and they're not fair to Bernie Sanders. And in fact, Tulsi Gabbard resigns as a member of the democratic national committee because the DNC is being so unfair to Bernie. 2020, there are all these machinations, um, because they wanted to stop Bernie again, Obama redeeming himself with Biden to a degree perhaps by helping to convince others to drop out of the race so Democrats could rally against Biden to stop Bernie.

And then of course, what happened in 2020, which is the Democratic Party leaning on state parties to not even permit primaries. I mean, the Dean Phillips campaign had to sue the Wisconsin Democratic Party all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to even put him on the ballot. And as you note, he wasn't like a real threat.

So I would say, well, I've heard people like Ezra Klein talk about the weakness of the Democratic Party, that this talk about the weakness of the Democratic Party. This is about the weakness of the Democratic Party or the weakness of parties in general, that the Democratic Party is built around, was built around Biden and the Republican Party is built around Trump. And to a degree, I think that's fair. But I will say the Republicans had a primary and they had strong candidates and they were on the ballot and they had debates.

Trump didn't participate, but they had debates and Republican voters picked who they picked, probably aided by Alvin Bragg and Letitia James in ways. But I mean, I think one of the biggest problems and Democrats have not asked my advice, I don't know about Alex. I don't think that I'm going to be getting any invitations to speak anytime soon, but letting voters decide, having open primaries. I mean, whatever you think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and I don't think much of him

in terms of his views on vaccines, I mean, why was he not allowed to be a candidate? Or Marianne Williamson, why was he not allowed to be a candidate, you know, or Marianne Williamson? Why was it such a transgression to allow them to be on a ballot or to have a debate? What's so crazy about that? Dean Phillips, as you know, Scott, he says the main reason he ran was he wanted to force Biden on a debate stage so people could see what he had been seeing behind the scenes. Would that really have been such an awful idea in retrospect?

And I would just add, you know, the Democrats, the Democratic Party, I think truly believe with a sincere conviction that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. And if you believe that, it's easy to rationalize anything, including in some ways doing things that are anti-democratic, which is what they did in basically rigging the 2024 primary to ensure that Biden would stay the nominee. It's so interesting because it's the opposite, isn't it? I remember in 1992, I was a second year in business school and a friend of mine, her father was a wealthy developer in Sacramento and she knew I was into politics and said, I was at a big Dukakis for president sign in my window.

Remember him? And she said, my father's hosting a fundraiser for this unknown governor from Arkansas. And he's got no shot whatsoever, no shot. But we're thinking about him for 96 or 2000. And I went and met this guy. And back then, it's reported he had a photographic memory and he would get a cue card on everyone in the room.

And I'm in a room, second year business school, bad suit, intimidated in a room, 100 people. And he throws up his arm and he yells, Scott. And it comes over to me and the guy goes, I heard you like me were raised by a single mother. And he looks me in the eye and he takes my hand and he goes, it wasn't easy, was it? And I remember thinking, and I've gone on to raise money and canvas for the Clintons.

Like, at that moment, I was all in for any, Roger Clinton could have run for something, and I was gonna, I was gonna support him. And the primary process and that, that it really is just such an incredible process. And when it's let, when it's let loose, of not only maturing the right person, but maturing the right man or woman for that moment. I mean, I think we underestimate just how powerful a process it is when we let it run.

And anything we do to get in the way of that, it's just, it's not only not democratic, it's just stupid. It's an amazing means of vetting the right person at the right moment. It's been my great privilege to be a campaign reporter and the two moments that mean the most to me just as a campaign reporter was one, covering John McCain in 2000 and watching that. And one of the things that was so interesting about it is he went from being a very conservative guy except on campaign finance. He was a very experiential guy.

Like what he experienced informed his life. And that campaign changed him. Not just the Bush machine bullying him and all that, but he just became much more open-minded about different things. And he started teaming up with Democrats on bipartisan legislation. It was just interesting watching a person mature, as you just noted, and seeing the same thing on the Obama side. In 2007, he was a shitty candidate.

I'd see him in these high school gymnasiums on a Friday night in, you know, armpit Iowa. And he was awful. He was listless. He was mad that he was there. He missed his wife. He missed his daughters. And like Axelrod and those guys, pluff, they would kick the shit out of him. Like, what are you doing?

Do you want to be president or do you not? And he grew. He grew and became the Barack Obama that got elected president. And seeing that close up is an incredible thing. And I don't think that we've, I'm trying to think, I mean, there was a Republican primary this last election, but, you know, Donald Trump was essentially an incumbent running. But watching the process really is just great. And Democrats are so fearful. They're so terrified that the party's going to nominate Bernie Sanders or whatever. And it's

just like, let the party nominate who they want. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Trynet. Trynet's full range of HR solutions were built for purpose-driven companies such as ZAP Surgical. Founded by pioneering neurosurgeon and inventor Dr. John Adler, ZAP Surgical has spent the last decade developing precision brain care solutions that make world-class radiological surgery universally accessible, treating more patients with greater accuracy and charting a new frontier in medicine, from physical health to mental well-being. And when Dr. Adler needed a provider of HR solutions to help him recruit the best of the best, he went with Trynet.

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than ever thanks to advances like vaccines, antibiotics, and clean water. And with the incredible progress being made in treating deadly conditions including heart disease and cancer, mortality rates for each have dropped by double digits. Now, science is tackling a new challenge, curing aging itself. Will new breakthroughs add even more years to our lives? Can older brains be rewired to function like younger ones? And which so-called biohacks actually work? Join Carl Zimmer as he investigates what current science is claiming about longevity and gets

to the bottom of what's unbelievable and what's actually possible. You can find the world as you'll know it, the future of aging, wherever you get your podcasts or you can listen at avanteen.org slash podcast. That's A-V-E-N-T-I-N-E dot org slash podcast. We're back with more from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. So just going back to this notion that we have a tendency or this narcissism gets in the way. I'll put forward a thesis on what you guys respond to it and I can't help. I've got two great political minds so I want to talk about a little bit about our current

situation. I'm upset that we have this emerging kleptocracy, cacostocracy, whateverocracy you want to call it. And what I think is worse is I feel like we're feckless and neutered in terms of our resistance to it. I feel there's a total lack of leadership on the Democratic side. And arguably, arguably, you know, the leader of the Democratic Party, I don't know if you would agree with this, is Senator Schumer.

And I think some of that same narcissism and age is coming to fruition there. Do you think there needs to be a process for essentially saying, okay, are these the right people to stink the tenure to represent our party and put up a fight? If the election, my understanding is the election were held today, despite everything we know about this kind of mob family approach to governance, Donald Trump would be reelected again. So Senator Schumer and some of the other people

in the Democratic Party, do we still suffer from the same narcissism and inability to put the best people forward to put up the fight? I mean, I think Chuck Schumer, and you talk to many, many Democrats, a lot of people believe Chuck Schumer has lost a few steps. That being said, there is a vacuum. And I think the party is going through a process of reckoning

with what just happens. And sometimes those processes take a while. I mean, the Republican Party was in a complete state of catastrophe after 2008. And it wasn't clear if there was any sort of leader that was emerging, and eventually you did have people come forward. And I think that's what's happening to the Democratic Party. Now, amidst that vacuum, to your point, a lot of, there's a lot of things happening

and there is not really an effective opposition. I mean, it's up to the Democratic senators and House members to pick their leaders. And, you know, I don't have advice for Democrats and I don't have advice for Republicans. I personally think that what Democrats, that all of Democrats right now are being blamed for the Biden fiasco, and by that I mean his decision

to run for reelection and his decision to hide his deterioration. Because no one is coming out and saying, as our reporting suggests, this was the fault of President Biden, his wife, and his son, and like a number, a few top aides. But this isn't necessarily something that could be laid on the feet of every single elected Democrat in the country. People saw things, but ultimately they were being lied to by a small group of people. My personal view is that until the Democratic Party reckons with that,

people are going to have a very difficult time trusting them on anything. I think that in the same way the Republican Party had to reckon with the Iraq War, until it became, I mean, it took years, years before, I guess it was 2016 when Donald Trump became a nominee who was willing to say that was a mistake. But until then, it was heresy for a Republican to acknowledge that. I don't know how long it's going to take for a Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or a Gavin Newsom or whatever to say, you know, we got lied to and I didn't do enough as a governor or as a democratic leader to push on this, but we need, we can't ever let this happen again. And this is my position on this XYZ. I think that this is the true cross they have to bear.

Because I mean, I just see it with family and friends who are Democrats. I'm a member of the Bull Moose Party, but family and friends who are Democrats who are furious with the Democratic Party. And it can be triggered just by, they see Chris Van Hollen going down to El Salvador to meet with an undocumented immigrant who's a wife beater. And yes, he should be afforded due process as anybody in this country should be afforded due process. It's set and yes, the Trump administration should have by the law and all that. But they see energy being directed towards things that are not helpful to them that they don't understand.

And on a hair trigger, they can get mad about it. And when I poke in prod with these friends and family members, and I'm using a, not a hypothetical, this is an example that happened with somebody, ultimately, they're still mad about Biden. They just think Democrats are liars. And they don't even like it. I mean, it is, I think, to a lot of people and a lot of Democrats, like finding out that the wizard is behind the curtain or your entire religion is based on, you know, a lie that somebody concocted or I mean, it's I think it is a very debilitating thing

You you a lot of people are raised you're a Democrat you're a Republican and then you find out that Let's say that you're a never Trump Republican. You find out that it actually isn't about strong international relations and free trade and respect for authority and you know that it's just actually about Donald Trump and in this case for authority and you know that it's just actually about Donald Trump and in this case it's just like you were raised as a Democrat and it turns out that it wasn't about anything other than preserving this old man's ego and his desperate cling to power. I mean I think that that is just severely traumatic. So I want to put forward a thesis something we think about a lot here in the Prof. G. University podcast, and that is, and granted, you know, I'm a hammer, so everything I think I see as a nail, but my thesis around how we elected a felon and an insurrectionist is that if you look at the groups that pivoted hardest

from blue to red, 2020 to 2024, Latinos, and my thesis there is they don't even want to be identified as a group, to people under the age of 40, who for the first time aren't doing as well as his or her parents were at 40 or 30. So the country's not working for them. They want to change. And then women, 45 to 64. And my thesis is that's the mothers of young men.

And at the Democratic National Convention, I saw a parade of special interest groups addressing the very real concerns and issues still facing a lot of these groups. But I didn't see one person talk about or even acknowledge the struggle of the group I believe has fallen furthest, fastest in America, and that's young men.

Four times likely to kill themselves, three times likely to be addicted, 12 times likely to kill themselves, three times likely to be addicted, 12 times likely to be incarcerated. I believe that the Democratic Party may have lost the election because they refuse to acknowledge because of a purity test or not meeting a purity test addressing the issues facing young men in this country and that we drastically need to move away from identity politics and focus on the folks that are really facing the most headwinds in our society right now. And I'm just curious, the Democratic Party's ability to even acknowledge the struggles that young men are facing in this country and if it played a role in the election.

Absolutely. The party has a big problem with young men who feel that the party doesn't care about them or sees their struggles as lesser than other people's struggles. Now I would also say one of the things that's very hard about this last election is it's very difficult to draw hard and fast lessons from it because Democratic Party sort of like, you know, sort of forfeited, you know, they dropped their nominee with 107 days to go and then ran and then only, you know, she had a lot of money, but she only had 107 days. So I think that's, in Democrats I talk to, it's like the single hardest thing for them to reckon with is drawing lessons, because it was such a chaotic process. So I think your point is well taken. But I also think what's making a lot of Democrats struggle to figure out why they lost is because you had such a weird process and didn't have like a full a nominee with a full runway to make their case

Okay, so We talked about this last time we talked and I actually love talking to you about this because it's a conversation that I've only had with you and Peter Hanby from from Puck who covers a lot of this stuff. My son is now 15 years old and he's a gamer, he's a football fan, starting linebacker on his varsity football team. The Democratic Party has no way of communicating with him. They have no entree into his world. And in fact, it's interesting, I went on a left-leaning podcast that children made nameless, and we were talking about my kids, because I think they were both people without kids. And they asked me about my son, and I said he was,

you know, he's a football player, and he wants to be a policeman. And their joke was, about my 15-year-old son, oh, how does he feel about minorities? Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he's racist, my son. And like, you know, that was the big laugh, and then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff. And I thought to myself, this is why you fuckers are losing elections.

Like, my football playing son who has no political views, he's 15, he thinks about World War II and gaming and playing linebacker. That's his world. You're deciding he's a racist because he wants to be a cop. And why does he want to be a cop? He wants to be a cop because he wants to help people, you know, and he thinks that's the best way he can help people. And that's how the Democratic Party talks to men, not just white men, but men. And I mean, I get the idea that they thought Tim Walsh could, what's the term he used, code switch or something? He thought that he could translate

the Democratic Party values because he hunts and fishes and owns a gun and was in the army and drinks a beer. I mean, at least there was an attempt, but I find it just insane that the party, I mean, look, I'm 56 now. So, but I remember when, I mean, I grew up in a Queen Village, which is on the border of South Philadelphia.

And like, those were all Democrats, these beer drinking union guys. And probably a lot of them still are, just because Philadelphia is such a one-party town. But if you made, if there was this thriving Republican party in Philadelphia, they'd lose a lot of elections. So I don't get what they're doing, but I think it's a lot of what you're saying, like toxic masculinity and white privilege. These are the things that my son hears when people are talking to him. He's 15, you know?

Of course he has privilege. He has privilege because he's white, because he's male, because he's my son, all that, but like that's not how he sees the world. He's 15. So, we've got to wrap up here, because I know you guys are busy, but I'm going to use this as a segue to talk about media and its impact on elections moving forward. Just a quick stat with respect to Rogan. The 40 million views on YouTube and the 15 million audio downloads, for Harris to have gotten the same number of impressions she would have had to have gone on

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox every night for three hours for two weeks. And that's a lead into my question. Jake, I think you're the king of all media. You're a pilot for Pan Am Airlines, but it's Pan Am in the 70s. Traditional media is, I mean, enjoy it. They had a lot of stewardesses, give kids wings, but that industry,

I think the sun is passing midday. I think the average age of cable news viewers is 70. And I think one of the big errors of the Democratic Party not figuring out a way to speak to people via podcasts, the average age of a podcast listener is 34. And a 70-year-old woman watching MSNBC, she knows who she's voting for. Whereas 34-year-old males tend to focus on economics. And that is a swing issue because no party owns it. Sometimes Democrats are seen as better for the economy and Republicans are seen as better for the economy, which makes no fucking sense given Democrats

have created 40 million jobs in the last 40 years and Republicans one million, but be that as it may, it's a swing issue. I'm curious how you guys see as CNN and Axios, how you personally are responding or trying to meet the moment around transitioning media or your platforms. How are you guys personally thinking about your message? Are you trying to get into podcasting? What do you think traditional media? Just thoughts on the media ecosystem moving forward? Obviously, we're in a tremendous time of disruption. Sir Mark Thompson, the head of CNN right now, is the guy who helped bring the New York Times from a

newspaper with a website to a website with a newspaper, making it profitable and making it sustainable. So hopefully he will figure out what to do. And obviously we know that it's not just cable news that's going through this, it's everything, movies, entertainment, on TV, books. I've now written seven books and the first few, like all they cared about was hardback sales. And now there's an acknowledgement that Kindle and Audiobook are thriving ways that people

are consuming information. So all of which is to say, I don't know where this ends up, but CNN and every media organization needs to figure out a way to get to where people are on their phones or on their streaming services. And I mean, I agree with everything you're saying. I do not have a podcast. The notion that I would have- Oh, you will.

This is the easiest prediction in history. Jake Tapper will have a podcast. Yeah, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt Jake Tapper will have a podcast. Yeah, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt that someday I will have a podcast. I mean, right now, every day I make sure that I put something on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Substack, everything. I have no idea what's gonna live and what's gonna die,

but I wanna make sure that I'm part of it. And I do, I have to believe that there will always be an audience and a desire for people who can just give the news and give analysis without being part of a team, without being a Democrat, without being a Republican who will, who are willing to write a book critical of Joe Biden while also going on air and providing critical analysis of Donald Trump. I got to believe that that's sustainable, but how do we get there? I don't know.

Alex? The one thing that makes me optimistic is people are always going to want to get new information that they can trust. But to your point, how they get that is changing so rapidly. And even with the, you know, bringing in AI, so like commodity news can just be written up by a program, which obviously is gonna change our jobs too in huge ways by 2028. But I just think you have to meet the audience

where they are, because I think people will always want new information that they can trust. And so that's the one thing that makes me optimistic because as long as you sort of keep that North Star and just figure out the different ways to get them the information, I think things will be okay. Yeah, well, this is the easiest, I've been in business my whole life and an operator. The some rip off the rest is politics

with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Boom, I got a 10% royalty. Gentlemen, Jake Tapper anchors a lead on CNN and serves as the network's chief Washington correspondent. Alex Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and a CNN contributor. You're both great at what you do, but I know enough about media.

Whenever I read or watch you guys, the thing I appreciate and people don't, I know enough about this business to be dangerous. You guys do the work. Jake doesn't just show up and read off a teleprompter. He does the work off camera. And Alex, I love some of the analysis you do. It's, I can tell every time you write something,

you're like asking yourself, what is the insight here? And you spend real time. So you guys do the work and I'm very, I'm fans of you both and really appreciate your time and your good work in this important moment. Thank you. And thank you for doing what you do. And thank you for focusing on young men in this country

because it is so important. it's in a conversation, that we as a society just don't have enough. Thanks very much, Jake. Thanks, gentlemen. Thank you. [♪ Music playing. Fading out. [♪ Music playing. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon.

Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.