Speaker 1: On this episode of news World. The twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: presidential election was an election the American people dreaded a
Speaker 1: rematch between the two oldest men to ever serve as president.
Speaker 1: But somewhere along the way, the Battle for the White
Speaker 1: House became the most jaw dropping, heart pounding, head turning
Speaker 1: contest in American history. The ride was so wild that
Speaker 1: it forced a sitting president to drop his reelection. Bid
Speaker 1: I once sent future president to survive felony convictions and
Speaker 1: a would be assassin's bullet, and a vice president unexpectedly
Speaker 1: thrown into the arena to mount an unprecedented one hundred
Speaker 1: and seven day campaign to lead the free world. And
Speaker 1: that's why I was very excited that. In their new
Speaker 1: book Fight Inside, the Wildest Battle for the White House,
Speaker 1: best selling authors Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes provide the
Speaker 1: first graphic view of the characters, their motivations, and the
Speaker 1: innermost thoughts as they battled to claim the ultimate prize
Speaker 1: and define a political era. Based on real time interviews
Speaker 1: with more than one hundred and fifty insiders from the Trump, Harris,
Speaker 1: and Biden inner circles, as well as party leaders and operatives,
Speaker 1: Fight delivers the vivid and stunning tale of an election
Speaker 1: unlike any other. Here to discuss their book. I'm really
Speaker 1: pleased to welcome my guests, Jonathan Allen, an award winning
Speaker 1: political reporter at NBC News, and Amy Parnes, a senior
Speaker 1: political correspondent covering national politics at The Hill. Welcome to
Speaker 1: both of you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, mister speaker. It's a pleasure to be
Speaker 3: with you.
Speaker 1: First of A, I want to congratulate you as an
Speaker 1: author myself. The fact that Fight is number two in
Speaker 1: the New York Times Nonfiction bestseller list this week. It's
Speaker 1: a great achievement for a book which I think, by
Speaker 1: word of mouth, is just going to continue to sew.
Speaker 1: I'm curious when did you two come up with the
Speaker 1: concept of doing this book.
Speaker 4: This is our third campaign book, and we weren't even
Speaker 4: going to do it until our publisher asked us on
Speaker 4: the heels of Biden's disastrous debate last June, if we
Speaker 4: would jump in, and so, of course we were pulled in,
Speaker 4: and we knew that it was going to be an
Speaker 4: incredible election cycle, but we could never have predicted the
Speaker 4: twists and turns that this race would take.
Speaker 1: When you talked about that debate and you write that quote,
Speaker 1: Biden altered the course of the twenty twenty four election
Speaker 1: in a profound and prominent manner. Did the debate surprise you?
Speaker 3: It did, mister speaker. And here's the reason. It's not
Speaker 3: that Amy or I thought that Joe Biden was that
Speaker 3: Joe Biden of the vice presidency or his days in
Speaker 3: the Senate. We wrote a book about the twenty twenty
Speaker 3: election called Lucky that delved into the strange situation where
Speaker 3: Biden was able to be hidden because of the pandemic,
Speaker 3: basically hidden from the voters for most of that election.
Speaker 3: We knew that he had even at that point, lost
Speaker 3: something off his fastball, and I think we all saw
Speaker 3: that there was decline. But still it is shocking, I'm
Speaker 3: trying to think of a better word for it, but
Speaker 3: just utterly shocking to see the leader of the free
Speaker 3: world so bereft of coherent thought. I mean, there should
Speaker 3: never be a minute period or five minute period where
Speaker 3: the president of the United States is in the kind
Speaker 3: of fog that Joe Biden was in that night, and
Speaker 3: the way that we put it in the book, and
Speaker 3: I you know, sources had put it to us, is
Speaker 3: you can't unsee that. You can't see the person with
Speaker 3: all the power to defend us with his finger on
Speaker 3: the nuclear button just incapable of cogency. And so it
Speaker 3: was shocking on that level. The degree to which and
Speaker 3: the profundity of the decline I think was shocking.
Speaker 1: Do you report that his total debate prep was one
Speaker 1: forty five minute round? First, well, I'm not quite sure
Speaker 1: why they wanted this early debate. You might be able
Speaker 1: to shed some light on that. But if you're going
Speaker 1: to do an early debate, is the incumbent it was
Speaker 1: anyway you would block in a week to just totally focus,
Speaker 1: and they get forty five minutes?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, I think, mister speaker, they wanted to change
Speaker 4: the trajectory of the race. They needed a reset. They
Speaker 4: were looking at their internal pulling and it was showing
Speaker 4: that the former president was winning, and so I think
Speaker 4: his team got together and thought that they needed to
Speaker 4: do something to change the direction. And so they landed
Speaker 4: on this debate, thinking that it would be a reset
Speaker 4: of sorts, and little do they know, it would pull
Speaker 4: them in the other direction and it would lead to
Speaker 4: the president withdrawing from the race. They tried to do
Speaker 4: various debate sessions with him, but he was in the
Speaker 4: middle of a cold. We described this in great detail
Speaker 4: in the book. But he had a sore throat and
Speaker 4: he was coughing and sneezing, and they tried to work
Speaker 4: with him. We asked, why wouldn't you cancel the debate,
Speaker 4: and they thought that that would be even worse. It
Speaker 4: would signal to people that, you know, he was weak
Speaker 4: and couldn't be while he was sick, and so they
Speaker 4: were in a no win situation.
Speaker 1: Do you think in retrospect they would have been better
Speaker 1: after cancel.
Speaker 3: That's a good question. I think if they thought they
Speaker 3: could reschedule it quickly, then maybe it would have been
Speaker 3: better to cancel. The truth is, maybe those were the
Speaker 3: worst five minutes or ten minutes of Joe Biden's life.
Speaker 3: But my guess is that they weren't. And at some
Speaker 3: point the American public was either going to decide that
Speaker 3: he was hiding too much or they were going to
Speaker 3: see him like that. And if it had happened in
Speaker 3: September or October, you know, they wouldn't have had an
Speaker 3: opportunity to make a change. Obviously, President Trump wins despite
Speaker 3: having had to beat both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3: I think what Harris provided the Democrats was somebody that
Speaker 3: could rally around to minimize the number of defeats they
Speaker 3: had in House and Senate races.
Speaker 1: Do you think if Biden hedged in that he would
Speaker 1: have lost by a bigger margin than Harris did?
Speaker 4: I think definitely. I mean, he seems to think that
Speaker 4: he would have won. He has said as much, but
Speaker 4: all evidence points to the fact that she probably performed
Speaker 4: better than he would have.
Speaker 1: As you talked with people, what was the sense you
Speaker 1: got that there wasn't more honest reporting about just how
Speaker 1: deeply he had declined.
Speaker 4: I think it's an unfair criticism to be honest, mister speaker,
Speaker 4: because I know I can speak for myself and John
Speaker 4: in that we not only reported that his mental acuity
Speaker 4: and his age in our respective news outlets, but we
Speaker 4: also wrote about it in our previous book Lucky. We
Speaker 4: always kind of knew about this, but we do have
Speaker 4: new revelations in the book which shed new light on
Speaker 4: how much President Biden was losing. As John says his fastball,
Speaker 4: how he comes face to face with a Congressman, Eric Swalwell,
Speaker 4: and at a congressional picnic at the White House, and
Speaker 4: he doesn't recognize him. He needs to be cued by
Speaker 4: Swallwell about who he is. This is a guy who
Speaker 4: he competed against in twenty twenty and shared a debate
Speaker 4: stage with.
Speaker 2: And there are other moments.
Speaker 4: He needed fluorescent tape at a fundraiser's house to guide
Speaker 4: him from place to place. That's more common in rallies
Speaker 4: and bigger rallies, not as much in someone's home. A
Speaker 4: teleprompter as well at someone's home, and we go on
Speaker 4: and on. He needs a makeup artist when he travels.
Speaker 4: That's sort of the first order of business that he
Speaker 4: does when he's traveling. He meets with a makeup artist
Speaker 4: ahead of meetings zoom meetings with his own staff. And
Speaker 4: so there's revelation after revelation about all of this in
Speaker 4: the book.
Speaker 3: And mister Speaker, I would just add to that. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't make the argument that the media broadly covered itself
Speaker 3: in glory with the coverage of Biden's decline, but there
Speaker 3: are certain limitations. I mean, the White House was keeping
Speaker 3: him in such a cocoon that even mid to high
Speaker 3: level White House staffers didn't see him very often. When
Speaker 3: you're in the media, if you're an objective journalist, you
Speaker 3: can't go on television to write in a story that
Speaker 3: the guy's got dementia or Alzheimer's, or try to diagnose
Speaker 3: him as a doctor would. What you do is you
Speaker 3: try to talk to the people that are close to
Speaker 3: him and see what you can find out. Not surprisingly,
Speaker 3: the White House officials tend to be pretty defensive of
Speaker 3: the president. But as Amy said, I think both of
Speaker 3: us did reporting on that decline, dating back to our
Speaker 3: book Lucky and through the course of the last few years.
Speaker 3: I think even we were shocked at the level that
Speaker 3: we saw on the debate stage that one night, one
Speaker 3: last thing. The American people aren't done. They could see
Speaker 3: Biden's decline, even if it's not being reported as such,
Speaker 3: even if nobody's got a diagnosis form, they could see
Speaker 3: that decline, and they could see that the White House
Speaker 3: was lying about it. And I think that's part of
Speaker 3: the reason that Joe Biden was so unpopular by the
Speaker 3: time he was out of the race, and I think
Speaker 3: it's one of the reasons that swing voters didn't trust
Speaker 3: the Democrats. By the time election day rolled around in November.
Speaker 1: The next phase shocked me. Trump went through getting shot,
Speaker 1: the iconic moment of standing up, yelling, fight, fight, fight
Speaker 1: with blood coming down, going to a very successful convention,
Speaker 1: and everything is sort of set. You know that the
Speaker 1: Trump people know they can beat Biden. And I remember
Speaker 1: that Sunday morning after the convention, Biden just dropped out.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much George Clooney was responsible, but
Speaker 1: clearly between Speaker Pelosi and Barack Obama and others, there
Speaker 1: was a sudden surge to get him out of the race. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think what's interesting was your speaker is there's basically
Speaker 3: a twenty four day period there, and there are Democrats
Speaker 3: that are watching that debate that know that they need
Speaker 3: to get rid of Joe Biden, and one of them
Speaker 3: is Nancy Pelosi. But she also is very worried as
Speaker 3: she's talking to donors and friends and you know, remember Congress.
Speaker 3: Even that night, she's very worried, according to one of
Speaker 3: our sources who spoke to her, that there will be
Speaker 3: a bum rush to get rid of Biden and that
Speaker 3: they will end up with Harris. And she does not
Speaker 3: think that Kamala Harris is a very good candidate. She
Speaker 3: also knows that the president can't be forced from the ticket.
Speaker 3: That has to be his decision at some point, So
Speaker 3: she knows that there's going to be pushed back from him.
Speaker 3: If she pushes on him too hard, that he'll get
Speaker 3: his back up against the wall and he'll be counter productive.
Speaker 3: So you see her, over the course of twenty four
Speaker 3: days try to manage a process to get him to
Speaker 3: a place where he will get out. Other people try
Speaker 3: to do that, they're not as strong. His donors freeze
Speaker 3: the money. The money for their super pack got frozen,
Speaker 3: and we go into all the sort of details of
Speaker 3: these machinations in the book. We can talk about it
Speaker 3: for about nine hours and not detail all the stuff
Speaker 3: that's in the book. But I mean, I think the
Speaker 3: basic core is not just smart Democrats, but I would
Speaker 3: say most Democrats understood that Biden needed to leave. The
Speaker 3: question was when you know how to get him to
Speaker 3: make that decision on his own and who would replace him.
Speaker 3: And two of the most powerful people in the party,
Speaker 3: Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, thought that the best idea
Speaker 3: was to have some sort of mini primary or open convention,
Speaker 3: a mini primary leading to an open convention, which in
Speaker 3: my humble opinion, would have been a complete blood bath
Speaker 3: for the Democrats that would have ended up with Kamala
Speaker 3: Harris as the nominee.
Speaker 1: Anyway, it just struck me at the time that I
Speaker 1: don't know to what extent she was inevitable, and to
Speaker 1: what extent Biden saying she should be my successor made
Speaker 1: it inevitable. You go from Joe Biden, the president is
Speaker 1: the nominee, to Joe Biden is withdrawn and she's virtually inevitable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's fascinating about that moment is gathered in her
Speaker 2: poolhouse at the Naval Observatory in Washington, are her very
Speaker 2: close aids and advisors, and they're all meeting, not knowing
Speaker 2: that this announcement is coming the coming hours. They're meeting
Speaker 2: to discuss what a switch might look like, and they
Speaker 2: all think it might happen later in the week, but
Speaker 2: they're surprised to learn when someone comes in and alerts
Speaker 2: them of the fact and she has to get on
Speaker 2: the phone with the President. It's quite startling to all
Speaker 2: of them. And then that leads to her kind of
Speaker 2: wanting She knows that every minute counts, and she really
Speaker 2: needs to get everyone behind her, including her boss, President Biden,
Speaker 2: and so she asks him on the call. She says,
Speaker 2: are you sure you're going to drop out? And he
Speaker 2: says yes, And she says, are you going to endorse me?
Speaker 2: And he says, You've got my support, kid, which obviously
Speaker 2: isn't a full endorsement, and she knows that, so she
Speaker 2: pushes even more and says, look, I need your endorsement,
Speaker 2: and so, long story short, he talks with his advisors
Speaker 2: and they issue an endorsement, but he was going to
Speaker 2: do it later in the week. So all of this
Speaker 2: was happening, and she knows that she needs the support
Speaker 2: because there are other Democrats who are considering maybe jumping
Speaker 2: in the race, and they're worried about people like Governor Pritzker.
Speaker 2: She knew she had to pounce and quickly.
Speaker 1: Did you think he did that because he genuinely liked
Speaker 1: her or he genuinely thought she was the natural follower
Speaker 1: of his presidency.
Speaker 3: I think he did it for a whole lot of reasons,
Speaker 3: mister speaker, And you would know this better than I would.
Speaker 3: But I think often when people make political decisions, they
Speaker 3: think about their gut, they make the list of pros
Speaker 3: and cons, and if everything lines up on the pro side,
Speaker 3: they do the thing. And I think in this case
Speaker 3: for him, there are a lot of things lining up
Speaker 3: on the pro side, the first of which was if
Speaker 3: he had picked somebody else or not endorsed her, it
Speaker 3: would have looked like him admitting a mistake and having
Speaker 3: picked her to be the vice president in the first place.
Speaker 3: He tells the American people in twenty twenty, this is
Speaker 3: the next best person to run the country should something
Speaker 3: happen to me. And if he turned around and didn't
Speaker 3: endorse her, I think it would have made him look
Speaker 3: bad in that original choice. I think because she's a
Speaker 3: black woman, and because the Democratic Party's sort of mores
Speaker 3: are or what they are, I think that he liked
Speaker 3: the idea that should she win, he would get some
Speaker 3: plaudits for having paved the way in that direction, and
Speaker 3: if he hadn't helped her, conversely, would have angered a
Speaker 3: lot of people in his own base. Just to touch
Speaker 3: on something Amy said a minute ago, it's just fascinating
Speaker 3: for anybody that loves politics, and we really fleshed this
Speaker 3: out in the book, is this moment of Joe Biden's
Speaker 3: vanity really where he is saying to Kamala Harris on
Speaker 3: the phone. And by the way, they had two phone calls.
Speaker 3: It's only been reported before that they had won, but
Speaker 3: in the book we have the second phone call too.
Speaker 3: He's got this moment of vanity where he's saying to her,
Speaker 3: I want you, but I want three or four days
Speaker 3: to just sort of bask in the glory of my
Speaker 3: own greatness at voluntarily giving up power like George Washington.
Speaker 3: And we all heard him say that right, Like when
Speaker 3: he gave his speech to the nation, he compared himself
Speaker 3: to George Washington. By the way, he compared himself to
Speaker 3: George Washington, to FDR to LBJ throughout his present and
Speaker 3: seeing I think that we will all look back and
Speaker 3: say that he was neither none of those leaders. He
Speaker 3: was not Reagan, not Lincoln. But there's this moment of
Speaker 3: vanity and he wants to be the center of attention still,
Speaker 3: and Kamala Harris is like, I got to like whip
Speaker 3: these votes. I got to get all these people lined up.
Speaker 3: I got to do it before Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsomber, JB.
Speaker 3: Pritzker gets out of the box, and I've gotten advantage,
Speaker 3: but only if you endorse me quickly. And if you
Speaker 3: don't endorse me quickly, we all devolved, and she finally
Speaker 3: sort of makes that case, and he ends up doing
Speaker 3: two statements about thirty minutes apart. That's as close as
Speaker 3: she can get to getting ab toor endorser in the
Speaker 3: first statement, is that he does his second one endorsing her.
Speaker 3: And to just point an exclamation point on why this
Speaker 3: mattered so much, we report that Jim Clyburn, a congressman
Speaker 3: from South Carolina. I know you know him well, mister Speaker.
Speaker 3: He was elected I think just before you became speaker.
Speaker 3: Cliburne knows he has a phone call scheduled with Obama
Speaker 3: that afternoon, and he wants to be able to get
Speaker 3: out his own endorsement of Harris because he knows Obama
Speaker 3: is calling to get him to support an open convention.
Speaker 3: So even after the transfer, Obama is still trying to
Speaker 3: make that happen.
Speaker 1: It does raise a question, sort of a what if
Speaker 1: all the delegates had already been picked so you had
Speaker 1: a finite universe. I mean, I do think the threat
Speaker 1: of the Black Caucus to have repudiated her would have,
Speaker 1: I think, irrevocably shattered the party for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: So in that sense, she was almost the inevitable money.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, you try to think about
Speaker 1: anybody else trying to enter at that point, even if
Speaker 1: Biden had not endorsed her, would have had an enormous
Speaker 1: uphill problem. I don't quite see how even somebody with
Speaker 1: Newsom's resources or Prisco's resources, how they could have done
Speaker 1: it in a short time that was available.
Speaker 3: I agree with you, mister Speaker, and I think that's
Speaker 3: one of the reasons none of them ended up trying,
Speaker 3: is that it takes enormous resources. She was able to
Speaker 3: inherit the Biden campaign treasury, which was a big thing
Speaker 3: that others would not have been able to do, or
Speaker 3: at least it would have been more complicated in terms
Speaker 3: of election law. So I agree with you. I think
Speaker 3: anybody else gets in, they have some sort of open convention.
Speaker 3: They destroyed their party for many years in the fight
Speaker 3: that happens, and she ends up with it.
Speaker 1: Anyway, we're at a point now he has endorsed her,
Speaker 1: she is inevitable. I've often thought about the Trump people
Speaker 1: that invested all the time and energy. They clearly thought
Speaker 1: they had Biden in a position where they're going to
Speaker 1: beat him, and all of a sudden that Sunday, their
Speaker 1: world changes. I mean that had to be reasonably traumatic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was very much traumatic, not least
Speaker 3: for President Trump. Something that's lost at times, I guess
Speaker 3: is sort of the degree to which his comeback is
Speaker 3: like the most epic comeback in American political history.
Speaker 1: Maybe you could argue Andrew Jackson from after he lost
Speaker 1: in twenty four this is the most extraordinary personal achievement
Speaker 1: of just grinding your way to power that I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: And he beats Joe Biden, he knocks him clean out
Speaker 3: of the election. There's one more for anybody that plays
Speaker 3: video games. It's like one more boss after you thought
Speaker 3: you won the video.
Speaker 1: When I talked to him during that period, they were
Speaker 1: actually pretty confident that they beat her. I think they
Speaker 1: were a little rattled about how to shift gears and
Speaker 1: that took him about a week. But underneath that they
Speaker 1: thought they would shift gears, that she was definable, they
Speaker 1: would be able to beat her, and they just had
Speaker 1: to grind it out.
Speaker 3: So I agree with you the people that we spoke
Speaker 3: to also felt confident, but I would say a little
Speaker 3: nervously confident, right, I mean there's that underlying We don't
Speaker 3: know exactly how long her sugar high's going to last.
Speaker 1: And it was disoriented. I mean, you suddenly had all
Speaker 1: this new money coming in, all this new enthusiasm, and
Speaker 1: you had, of course the propaganda media's all out effort
Speaker 1: to build her up as though she was Joan of
Speaker 1: Arc reincarnated. Maybe it would have been a close race
Speaker 1: around Labert. There was sort of a peak moment of
Speaker 1: pretending that she was really competent, and then gradually that
Speaker 1: turned out that she lacked the cognitive excuse that Biden has.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't actually much better at answering questions than Biden.
Speaker 3: Was arguably worse, right, I mean, this was a change election.
Speaker 3: The vast majority of Americans said the country was on
Speaker 3: the wrong track. Biden offered nothing and change. He's out,
Speaker 3: there's this opportunity for her to offer something that is
Speaker 3: changed from what Biden's doing, and she lashes herself to him,
Speaker 3: and he tells her as we were in the book
Speaker 3: for the first time, he says to her, no daylight kid,
Speaker 3: don't distance yourself. For me, there should be no daylight
Speaker 3: between us. And she's hearing this as she comes in,
Speaker 3: and you know, she owes him some loyalty put her
Speaker 3: in this position in the first place, and she doesn't
Speaker 3: have her own plan, and I think that becomes pretty apparent.
Speaker 3: And so as a result, the Democrats are offering nothing
Speaker 3: in the way of substantive change to the American people
Speaker 3: in what was clearly a change election I mean elections
Speaker 3: or change elections. But I don't remember a right track
Speaker 3: wrong track that looked like the right track wrong track
Speaker 3: of this election cycle. It could not have been screaming
Speaker 3: more loudly at the Democrats.
Speaker 1: The Jimmy Carter right track wrong track in eighty was comparable,
Speaker 1: but not dramatically works. She's raising this astonishing amount of money.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine you could raise that amount of
Speaker 1: money and not somehow figure out a strategy for defining
Speaker 1: Trump out of the race, I know.
Speaker 4: And you know what's interesting is that she had outraised
Speaker 4: him and outspent him in the end, and even the
Speaker 4: metrics were all in her favor too, you know, And
Speaker 4: they kept pointing out us that they had more boots
Speaker 4: on the ground, they had more people in the swinging states,
Speaker 4: And what's interesting is it didn't matter because she wasn't
Speaker 4: really connecting. Her message wasn't resonating with voters, and they
Speaker 4: were all over the place in terms of message, and
Speaker 4: I think that's why you're seeing the Democratic Party right
Speaker 4: now kind of loss and not understanding what it is
Speaker 4: they stand for.
Speaker 1: From that standpoint, I always felt that she was sort
Speaker 1: of caught on a trap and that if she had
Speaker 1: tried to distance herself from Biden, Biden would probably have
Speaker 1: reacted very aggressively, and he did towards the end. I
Speaker 1: always thought, towards the very end that he and Jill
Speaker 1: decided it'll be pretty cool to be the only person
Speaker 1: ever to beat Trump. But I just had this sense
Speaker 1: that there are three or four things he did towards
Speaker 1: the end that hurt her, and that they weren't because
Speaker 1: he was stupid and old Jesus decided that she wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be president, and that he was pretty happy
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 3: I don't think our reporting ever got to the level
Speaker 3: of here's exactly what Joe Biden was thinking as he
Speaker 3: sabotaged Kamala Harris. But to your point, you can literally
Speaker 3: point to three or four things that he did. By
Speaker 3: the way, the White House staff was telling the campaign
Speaker 3: staff do whatever you have to do to win, and Biden,
Speaker 3: one on one with Harris was telling her don't distance yourself.
Speaker 3: So I think that's a number one sort of thing.
Speaker 3: And to share other point, there's an implicit threat in
Speaker 3: that he's still the sitting president. He still has the
Speaker 3: bully pulp at the platform, and if she distances herself,
Speaker 3: he has the ability to slam her for it, no
Speaker 3: matter how directly or subtly or whatnot. He has the
Speaker 3: ability to influence her future. And then you know, he
Speaker 3: puts on a Maga hat at one of the rallies.
Speaker 3: My son still thinks that Joe Biden endorsed Donald Trump
Speaker 3: because he saw that video that didn't Biden endorse Trump.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, no, Biden didn't endorse Trump. He makes
Speaker 3: that remark about and I want to use quotation marks
Speaker 3: here about Trump supporters being garbage while she's giving her
Speaker 3: sort of her culmination speech, you know, at the foot
Speaker 3: of the White House. So, yeah, he did some things.
Speaker 1: I wrote it at the time. If you hold a
Speaker 1: big party with seventy five thousand people directly in front
Speaker 1: of the White House, and you don't invite the president
Speaker 1: first lady, they are likely to be very offended. What
Speaker 1: did I miss?
Speaker 3: I think you're right, mister speaker.
Speaker 1: What was the Harrish team thinking?
Speaker 4: I think they wanted to publicly distance themselves from him.
Speaker 4: They see the polls more than anyone. They knew how
Speaker 4: unpopular he was in that moment, and yet they couldn't
Speaker 4: quite do that because of what the President was telling Paris,
Speaker 4: which was pleased no daylight between us, and so they
Speaker 4: were walking a tightrope in how to handle that situation.
Speaker 1: One of the interesting things you get into that was
Speaker 1: a little bit of a surprise, I think was the
Speaker 1: emergence of JD. Vance as vice president. Trump really weighed
Speaker 1: that for a pretty good length of time. It wasn't automatic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I think that process played out the way.
Speaker 3: Not every process that President Trump engages and plays out
Speaker 3: in a sort of traditional way, but I think this
Speaker 3: one kind of did in that I think Vance was
Speaker 3: always the favorite, or at least had to lead over
Speaker 3: the others, and the President in the end got back
Speaker 3: to his guy or the guy that was leading the pack.
Speaker 3: But he has this sort of beauty pageant, right or
Speaker 3: the bachelorette or something where he's bringing vice presidential hopefuls
Speaker 3: on stage with him and he's praising them and he's
Speaker 3: talking about their chances openly. It's entertainment, and it keeps
Speaker 3: the focus on Trump and that pick at times when
Speaker 3: it might otherwise have been on Harris. We write about
Speaker 3: the sort of last effort to lobby him on Trump
Speaker 3: Force one as he's flying to the Republican Convention. I
Speaker 3: think in the end, Vance represented where the mag of
Speaker 3: movement is going. I think he has his finger on
Speaker 3: the pulse of it better than anybody else. I think
Speaker 3: Trump knew that Vance would be loyal to him as
Speaker 3: vice president, and I think, or at least thought he
Speaker 3: would be. And as we write, Trump doesn't actually think
Speaker 3: vice president is the most important of his picks. He
Speaker 3: thinks Secretary statement Attorney General are a little bit more important.
Speaker 3: But I think Vance represented enough of the things that
Speaker 3: he was looking for and nobody else did.
Speaker 1: I have to go back, just for a second to Harris.
Speaker 1: Do you think if the campaign had lasted longer she
Speaker 1: would have done better or worse.
Speaker 4: She thinks that if the campaign went on longer she
Speaker 4: would have won. And we report that in the books
Speaker 4: she's told aids that she thinks the condensed timetable was
Speaker 4: not in her favor. But that's interesting because a lot
Speaker 4: of Democrats think that the shorter timetable did favor her.
Speaker 4: She came into it, she had the convention, she had
Speaker 4: the wind at her back, and then there was a
Speaker 4: period where she didn't do any media and people had
Speaker 4: this sense that she was trying to run out the clock,
Speaker 4: and I think that hurt her, you know, and the
Speaker 4: fact that she wasn't out there and let Trump sort
Speaker 4: of build the narrative around him at the time. And
Speaker 4: then there were these two ads, of course in the
Speaker 4: final weeks of the campaign that I think were potent,
Speaker 4: and one of them was the trans ad, which I
Speaker 4: think was probably the best political ad in recent cycles.
Speaker 4: And then another ad which talked about her appearance on
Speaker 4: the View, where she essentially said that there was nothing
Speaker 4: she would do that was different from the president. Both
Speaker 4: of those things hurt her in big way.
Speaker 1: I thought that was the death knell. Frankly, they loved
Speaker 1: the softest ball they could lob. She could have picked
Speaker 1: anything and said, well, I probably do it. X differently,
Speaker 1: but instead she goes, oh, no, I can't think of
Speaker 1: the thing I do differently. Well, as you are pointing out,
Speaker 1: if this is a change election, that's unbelievably self destructive
Speaker 1: on her part. If you want to understand the scale
Speaker 1: of Trump's genius and his capacity now to have started
Speaker 1: in fifteen and still be there doing it, it was
Speaker 1: the combination of giving out French fries at McDonald's and
Speaker 1: then the garbage truck. If you're trying to appeal to
Speaker 1: Middle America, eighty seven percent of the country goes to
Speaker 1: McDonald's at least once a year. Eighty seven percent. Forty
Speaker 1: million Americans have worked at McDonald's, including Jeff Bezos. And then,
Speaker 1: of course you have the whole symbology with the garbage
Speaker 1: truck and Trump walking into the convention hall wearing the
Speaker 1: garbage outfit and saying it makes people, say it makes
Speaker 1: them look thinner. Maybe I should wear it the rest
Speaker 1: of the campaign. I mean, at that point, I don't
Speaker 1: care how much money she raises. The earned media value
Speaker 1: of those two events is incalculable.
Speaker 3: What seems to me, I absolutely agree with you. I mean,
Speaker 3: Trump figured out in this election and we detail some
Speaker 3: of it figured out in this election how to reach
Speaker 3: voters who are not traditional voters and to basically create
Speaker 3: a cultural affinity with a lot of them. And it's
Speaker 3: more valuable than golden politics to have somebody like you
Speaker 3: because they think you go to McDonald's with them, or
Speaker 3: you're willing to get in a garbage truck, or you
Speaker 3: get on one of the podcasts or one of the
Speaker 3: YouTube shows that they listen to, not for the politics,
Speaker 3: but because they like the comedian that's doing it, or
Speaker 3: they like the guests that show up there, and they
Speaker 3: suddenly start to think themselves, well, Donald Trump's not a politician,
Speaker 3: He's a guy like me. You know, you could sit.
Speaker 1: Down with Joe. Can you imagine Kamala trying to do
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan for three hours?
Speaker 3: No, it would have been a disaster. I mean it
Speaker 3: was a disaster that they set up a rally for
Speaker 3: her in Houston on a Friday night in the fall
Speaker 3: where football is the only thing going on, so that
Speaker 3: she can be close to Joe Rogan's studio in case
Speaker 3: they work out a deal and it falls through and
Speaker 3: it's not a swing state, there's no reason to be
Speaker 3: in Texas, and they bring in Beyonce, and Beyonce refuses
Speaker 3: to sing, so they don't even get that. Just total debacle.
Speaker 3: But what might have been a worst debacle would have
Speaker 3: been actually going on for three hours with Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3: As we saw in the ten seconds on the View,
Speaker 3: she didn't have anything to say that would have differentiated
Speaker 3: her from Biden on anything substantive. The one thing she
Speaker 3: said in the one debate was different between the two
Speaker 3: of them was background and experience. And that's not what
Speaker 3: the public was looking for. It wasn't like we want
Speaker 3: somebody with a different background running in the country. That's
Speaker 3: the change we're looking for.
Speaker 1: Well, I was watching Trump at Ultimate Fighting Championship. He
Speaker 1: currently has a net seventeen advantage among younger males in
Speaker 1: terms of approved disapproved seventeen okay, which for a Republican
Speaker 1: has probably not been true since Theodore Roosevelt. And what
Speaker 1: hit me watching him was, first of all, I obviously
Speaker 1: enjoys himself, but for an entire generation of younger males,
Speaker 1: they could identify with what he was doing in a
Speaker 1: way that nobody else in the country would. People at
Speaker 1: Harvard don't watch Aultimate Fighting Championships, but that there's a
Speaker 1: knack to what he does that is consistently marketing to
Speaker 1: niches nobody else thinks of, and doing it in ways
Speaker 1: that are not political, but have a consequence that's very political.
Speaker 1: And I think that makes him very different from anybody
Speaker 1: we've ever seen.
Speaker 3: It's second nature to him. It's the branding genius of
Speaker 3: Donald Trump. You know, you could put ten Pepsi executives
Speaker 3: in a room and they would be half as good
Speaker 3: as Trump is at branding himself, and it feels so natural.
Speaker 3: I am certain that, like most people in politics, he
Speaker 3: spends some of his time in the shower at night,
Speaker 3: thinking like, what's the catch phrase I want out there?
Speaker 3: But whenever it comes out, it just sounds like everything else.
Speaker 3: So to your point, I think he just kind of
Speaker 3: subliminally is branding all the time to various people.
Speaker 1: Well, I think he sleeps four hours a day, and
Speaker 1: I think for all twenty hours he's thinking about the
Speaker 1: next game. The next phrase. Is just an endless process
Speaker 1: in his book. Let me ask you to one last question.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you taking this time, and I'm delighted
Speaker 1: that your publisher talked to you into doing this book,
Speaker 1: which is pretty remarkable to put it together literally in
Speaker 1: real time as things were actually happening. But what's the
Speaker 1: biggest single surprise to you looking at the whole experience.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you. I think the biggest single surprise is
Speaker 3: the degree to which President Trump learns at his age
Speaker 3: most people aren't still actively learning. And you see I
Speaker 3: think between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, a real
Speaker 3: understanding of what his limitations were on twenty twenty, how
Speaker 3: he hurt himself in the twenty twenty election in different ways,
Speaker 3: and what he needed to do to keep this campaign
Speaker 3: on track, including but not limited to hiring Susie Wiles
Speaker 3: to run the show. I think she did a great
Speaker 3: job with that. I think his position on a national
Speaker 3: abortion ban, where he basically didn't endorse it, his staff
Speaker 3: came to him and said, look, a lot of these
Speaker 3: swing states have more liberal abortion laws, and if you
Speaker 3: do a national abortion band, you're going to energize the
Speaker 3: folks that are for abortion rights. You're going to energize
Speaker 3: them against you. But if you don't support the thing,
Speaker 3: you take that issue off the table in those states.
Speaker 3: They convinced him to get behind early voting, which he
Speaker 3: obviously doesn't believe in you know, he's going to try
Speaker 3: to get rid of that now, but they convinced him.
Speaker 3: In order to compete, you got to do this. So
Speaker 3: you go through this and you're like, here is a
Speaker 3: candidate who has truly evolved from twenty twenty in terms
Speaker 3: of focusing himself, disciplining himself on the campaign trail, listening
Speaker 3: to the right people, crowding out some of the wrong voices.
Speaker 3: To me, watching all of that happen, and getting sort
Speaker 3: of an inside book, which I think you do in
Speaker 3: this book. Was it was surprising because it's surprising any
Speaker 3: time a fully grown adult actually develops and learns. I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm almost fifty and it's hard for me to learn
Speaker 3: and change my ways.
Speaker 4: There were so many but I think the human aspect.
Speaker 4: We detail this scene in the book with Susie Wiles
Speaker 4: talking to a communications aide Danielle Alvarez. I'm in a
Speaker 4: kitchenette as the Trump criminal trial is happening in New York,
Speaker 4: and it's a very human moment because she tears up,
Speaker 4: she chokes up and says, I have a feeling if
Speaker 4: they're not going to get him this way, they're going
Speaker 4: to try to kill him, and I think that's a really,
Speaker 4: really powerful moment, and it shows just how much all
Speaker 4: of these people went through in the last cycle at least,
Speaker 4: and so I think that is one big revelation. But
Speaker 4: also when you look at the train wreck on the
Speaker 4: Democratic side, you see that Kamala Harris enters election night
Speaker 4: thinking that she's going to win, And I think that
Speaker 4: was one of the biggest bombshells in the book too,
Speaker 4: because she is gas lit by her own campaign. So
Speaker 4: I think you learn something new on every page of
Speaker 4: this book. But there are so many key moments that
Speaker 4: explain so much.
Speaker 1: Listen, I want to thank both of you for joining me.
Speaker 1: I think the speed with what you did this book,
Speaker 1: the number of unique insights you have in it. Fight
Speaker 1: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House really is
Speaker 1: a wild book about a wild battle that's available now
Speaker 1: on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. It's a great read.
Speaker 1: I recommend everybody wants to understand American politics and government
Speaker 1: how to get a copy of it, and we're certainly
Speaker 1: going to link to it on our show page. But
Speaker 1: I want to thank the two of you given everything
Speaker 1: you're doing, and your status is once again best selling authors.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you taking time with us.
Speaker 2: Thank you, mister Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 1: Thank you to my guests Jonathan Allen and Amy Parns.
Speaker 1: You can get a link to buy their new book
Speaker 1: Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House on
Speaker 1: our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced
Speaker 1: by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarnesie Sloan.
Speaker 1: Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
Speaker 1: was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
Speaker 1: at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
Speaker 1: you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with
Speaker 1: five stars and give us a review so others can
Speaker 1: learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld
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Speaker 1: Ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
Speaker 1: is neut World.