Behind the Scenes of Trump's Comeback - CNN Political Briefing - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

CNN

11-07-2025

Josh Dawsey
00:00:02
The Trump campaign and the Republican side had a better sense of where the voters were. They had a sense of how to reach voters than the Democratic side did. And more than anything, they had more enthusiasm on his side.
David Chalian
00:00:17
'Josh Dawsey has a unique perspective on last year's election. He's one of the authors of a new book out this week called 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America. It's a deep dive into what he and his co-authors describe as one of the most consequential presidential elections in our history. Josh, who's an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, wrote it along with his colleagues, New York Times reporter Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post. They conducted more than 350 post-election interviews to compile the account, which includes previously unreported details from the Trump, Biden and Harris campaigns. It is indeed a must-read. I'm CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director David Chalion, and this is the CNN Political Briefing.
David Chalian
00:01:14
Josh, thanks so much for being here, and congratulations on the book.
Josh Dawsey
00:01:16
I'm thrilled to be here with you.
David Chalian
00:01:18
First, I just wanna ask, when you set out to report out a campaign book and you are also a campaign reporter, just talk through the process of like, how much in your real time of covering the campaign are you collecting in your notebook stuff that doesn't make it into your stories, or how much of this is just all reporting from after the election until now? What is the process of getting this together?
Josh Dawsey
00:01:40
It's a mix of both. When we were doing this book, I was on staff at the Washington Post. I've since taken a new job at the Wall Street Journal, but I promised our bosses at the Washington Post that if we had anything that was headline news, that was major news that we found out in a way that we could report it, I would immediately share it with them. And we did that. There was nothing for the book that we held back because we thought, oh, you know, we've got to save this for the book. If we had news, we gave the news to our bosses. But you do pick up all sorts of things in reporting out a campaign. You know when you're at the hotel it's 10 p.m., and there's campaign aides sitting around the bar having a glass of wine, you talk to someone. You pick up atmospherics; you pick up sort of scenes; you pick up kind of the things that you live that really don't make it into a newspaper story or a web story, because you're sort of constrained for space. You have 1500 words or a thousand words or shorter, and you're really trying to get as many facts as possible in a story. And a book allows you to sort of do more. The other thing that the book allowed us to do, I think that campaign reporting doesn't allow us to do easily, is have really long conversations with people. A lot of my life has been writing about Trump for most of the last decade, as you know. And a lot of it, you're getting someone on the phone for eight minutes. You're trying to confirm something. You're chasing someone down to get 10 minutes of their time. With the book, we were able, with people on both sides of the aisle, to set up interviews that stretched five, six, seven hours, right? And, you know, we sent them sort of at times prompts in advance. Here are the things we want to talk about. Do your best to remember, bring notes, anything you have on these things. And then, obviously, we talked about whatever the sources wanted to talk about, as well. But it was able to do some deeper reporting that gave you, I think, some real color of what it's like to be on a campaign.
David Chalian
00:03:30
One of the things, Josh, that you write about in the book was looking at how the Trump campaign understood that they, in their polling, had an appeal, a growth appeal with African Americans and Latinos that perhaps wasn't present in previous campaigns that Trump had run. And then you point to a couple of events that your sources talk to you about where that came to life for them. Walk us through that. What did your sources tell you about either the Fulton County jail moment or the event up in the Bronx and what that instructed the campaign?
Josh Dawsey
00:04:04
'So there was a surreal scene that we recount in the book. The president has been indicted. He's going to this rat-filled, you know, grotesque Fulton County jail. There've been lots of deaths there. Federal monitors have looked into it. I mean, this is one of the more grim places probably in the United States. And while they're riding to the jail through neighborhoods in Atlanta, you have all of these people coming out from their porches on the balcony sort of to watch the motorcade, the Secret Service motorcade go to the Fulton County Jail so the former president, obviously became the president again, could have his mug shot taken. And a lot of those people were cheering and whooping and hollering. Now some were booing; some were giving the middle finger, but there was a mix of responses there. And I think that was one of the things in the book we say is that Susie Wiles, who's now chief of staff, told folks that was the most surreal moment really of her life, riding through the streets of Atlanta, in predominantly African American neighborhoods, being there with Trump, right? And then you saw that again in the Bronx. I mean, he got a large, large crowd, tens of thousands of people. And a lot of them were not just, you know, white men, right? They were all sorts of people: African Americans, Latino, Hispanic voters. And if you look at the analytics of this election, all of those groups moved considerably towards Trump, right? The theory of the case, and you have to sort of give Trump's folks credit for this, right? They said, oh, we're gonna win more black voters. And critics said, he can't win more black voters, look at things he said over the years. Look what he's done. We're gonna win more Hispanic voters. This is how we're gonna do it. People said, we can't do that. Various places, they ran pretty shrewd operations to run those numbers up in unlikely areas. And I think a lot of folks at the time, not inside the sort of inner circle of the campaign, but a lot folks on the outside and some of the media questioned whether they were sort of delusional, and they weren't delusational. They were able to do it.
David Chalian
00:06:07
Yeah, because those two events that you describe, I think anybody that followed the campaign remember those two of events. And it's just fascinating to hear what your reporting said from inside the campaign.
Josh Dawsey
00:06:16
Can I add one more beat on that? One of the other things we obtained for the book was this memo from the campaign's top data and political folks. They wrote it in February 2024. And the analysis was that the thing that Trump needed to do was run up the score with the men. It was not, you know, the traditional, oh, we've got to get suburban women. We've got to get independent voters. We've gotta go to the middle. We've gotta find all these people. They decided that the best theory of the case for Trump to win. Was to go after these folks, low propensity voters, that means folks who don't always vote, folks who vote rarely, folks who are hard to reach, to go after them because those people would vote for Trump. And when they analyzed the data, they showed that Trump's biggest slippage from 2016 to 2020 was actually with men. It wasn't with women. It wasn't sort of the conventional wisdom. And so what you saw the campaign do, they did try and run up the score, sort of, with white men, right? And they went after Latino men, Black men, but a lot of it was a gender gap more than it was anything else.
David Chalian
00:07:21
Yeah. And of course, that slippage from '16 to '20 is because the opponent on the other side went from being a female to a male candidate, right? And so Joe Biden was performing a little bit better with men than either Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris proved to. Again, February '24, they were running against Biden and wanted to make sure that they were addressing that growth that Biden was able to do between '16 and '20 there. I just want to go up to 30,000 feet here for one second and say, so you report the totality of this campaign. So, just broadly, Josh, like what was the 2024 presidential campaign about?
Josh Dawsey
00:07:53
'Well, the 2024 presidential campaign on the Democratic side was about a party that ignored lots of warning signs and a party that the American public was telling them they thought Biden was too old. They pushed Biden through. Then Biden drops out. Kamala Harris, a lot of her positions, polling showed, were not very popular. They sort of kept with a lot those positions. They didn't move to the middle. Folks were upset about the economy. The Democratic Party, I think, did not espouse, I mean, Biden argued, and with some facts behind it, that the economy did well on some measures, but people weren't feeling it. And you can't tell people, you know, if someone says they're feeling cold, you can say it's actually hot, and believe me. People feel what they feel, right? And campaigns have to be where the people are. I don't want to sit here and act like a Nostradamus, you know, after the campaign and say, oh, it was so obvious at the time, because none of these things are obvious at the time, right? It's difficult, right? And you talk to folks on both sides, but I do think what our book showed is that the Trump campaign and the Republican side had a better sense of where the voters were, had a better sense of how to reach voters than the Democratic side did. And, more than anything, they had more enthusiasm on his side, and I think what he also showed was that there were so many things that would knock out a traditional candidate: ninety-one felonies, you know taking classified documents hiding in the bathroom refusing to return them, getting indicted You know getting indited for his role and sort of perpetuating the false election was stolen, the false narrative and horrific things at the Capitol. You know the case in New York where he gets indicted and charged. A lot of legal scholars saw that case was the weakest of the bunch, but there were just all of these things that piled up, and Trump was most comfortable, our reporting showed, as a martyr, as a victim. And one of the things I don't think I realized in real time, but in the reporting for the book, it sort of made more sense to me, I sort of saw him angry and flailing away at all of these cases, and, you know, and he was angry at times. But there was a more concerted strategy from Trump and his lawyers to turn public sentiment against the prosecutors, meanwhile, while lawyers were delaying every case through every imaginable means until the end, right? He saw this sort of Herculean feat of, he was in all of this legal trouble. He had to get out. And he told me in the interview for the book, he said, you know, one of the reasons I had to win was if I lost, my life was not gonna be pleasant. And I think he saw that as an existential reason to run.
David Chalian
00:10:30
Which is just astounding to think about. We have a lot more to dig into. We're gonna take a quick break. We'll have a little bit more with Josh Dawsey in just a moment. You and I are speaking as we are approaching the one year anniversary of the assassination attempt in Butler and the conversation between Schumer and Biden that happened on that same day, July 13th, that sort of indicated to Biden that this was done. So we're now one year from these monumental moments that shaped this campaign. And you report in the book that even before the debate on CNN, in June of '24, that the Trump team was concerned that maybe Biden wasn't going to be the candidate all the way through, or at least wanted to develop a strategy for if that eventuality were to be?
Josh Dawsey
00:11:29
Yeah, there was discussions about that, but I don't think they were that serious. I think there were sort of preliminary discussions. I think after the debate happened, one of the things we have in the book is Trump's team is so determined to keep Biden in the race, and they're sort of sitting around thinking about what is it, is there anything we can do to keep this guy in, and one of the most interesting parts of the book to me is once Biden gets out, and Kamala Harris becomes a nominee, how angry Trump is about it. I mean he has about a month there where he goes to the National Association of Black Journalists Conference and sort of lashes out, is screaming at donors, at events, is losing it on his staff. It was a chapter in the book called Cruel Summer. And there's really, all the folks, the veterans of a Trump campaign, recall this hot August, end of July and August of last year, as by far the worst stretch of the campaign.
David Chalian
00:12:22
Cruel summer is the flip coin of "Brat Summer?"
Josh Dawsey
00:12:24
Yeah, well "Cruel Summer's" a Taylor Swift, it's a Taylor Swift lyric. We had to give Taylor Swift a little credit in the book. You mentioned the shooting day as well. I just want to make one point. My favorite chapter in the book, actually, is titled July 13th. And we saw that as the most pivotal day of the campaign because not only, you know, was the president, the candidate then, now the president, had an assassination attempt against his life. Biden was at his beach house in Delaware, furiously trying to save his campaign, meeting with members of Congress, meeting with Schumer, meeting with his top aides. The meetings were not going well. And, in the book, we sort of spend one chapter elongating that day. It's one of the longest chapters in the book, but we sort go through, hour by hour, this pivotal day in American history. And I think, you know, lots of things in the campaign you just can't get to, even in a book. There's so many things you could include and not include, but that day felt worthy of like a big examination and, I hope, you know, if you're, if you're listening, you'll check it out.
David Chalian
00:13:24
So one theme throughout the year, and this gets back to what you were saying about Trump's strategic pursuit of turning all of his legal troubles into political success. Given the initial sort of lackluster entrance into the race in November of '22, the conservative enthusiasm for DeSantis at that point as a potential thing. Whether Trump really still had the hold on his party after the '22 midterms. I can't find an example, and I don't know what your reporting shows on this. There never seemed to be a successful line of attack to land on the president. And then that carried as a problem in the general election, too. And I'm wondering, like, was there a line of attack that Trump people were preparing for that never came to be that they thought would be more problematic? Or what were they thinking as they saw, both their Republican opponents and then the Democratic opponents, not really be able to land something.
Josh Dawsey
00:14:20
Well, on the general election, I think the Trump folks were more concerned about abortion. They believe that the Democrats would talk about abortion more, they believed that they would make abortion a more effective message, that Trump appointed the justices that overturned Roe v. Wade in the majority. They viewed that as a political potential loser for them, but he sort of even shrewdly navigated the abortion issue by not taking a national position, leaving it up to the states. I think in the general election, the thing they were most worried about was abortion. In the primary election, it's interesting. Before Trump is indicted in New York, his numbers are wobbly. I mean, I went back and looked at polling at the time, and his own people knew they were wobbly. His PAC, Tony Fabrizio, who's his pollster, and others commissioned a poll. DeSantis was within about 10 points of him, right? And they realized they had to firebomb DeSantis. That was their word that we quote in the book, from the left and the right, because they didn't view anyone else as a real threat, right? So they sort of do this spectacular, not saying in a good way, but just across the board spectacular attack on DeSantis, right? They're going after him for personal things, they're going to after him for professional things. And a lot of Trump's staff were former DeSantis aides who hated him and were enjoying this with great fanfare. And DeSantis sort of sat back and didn't do anything. And so for five months, Trump just hammered him, hammered him, hammered him, and he didn't do anything, right? And so by the time Trump gets indicted in New York, the party is rallying sort of back towards Trump in a way already. And then that coalesces behind him in a really significant way, in a way that even surprised Trump. I mean, he told me for the book, I was kind of surprised how quickly these guys came out immediately and defended me, right? Because, you know, he's thinking to himself, would I go out and defend someone who was my opponent? Probably not. And then after that, the party was sort of back with him. And one of the things we have in the book is that DeSantis's team commissioned all these focus groups. What could we land on Trump? Where is he vulnerable? What do they not like? And like they couldn't find anything. They would say, you know, Trump actually didn't finish building the wall. Trump built only a few miles of the wall, and people go, that's not true, right? The voters were just giving him remarkable amounts of latitude. But here's a question that I don't think we ever will know. And I think one of the things this book tries to do is sort of look at the individual choices people made along the way and how they became a mosaic of history. But if DeSantis jumps in earlier when Trump is vulnerable, right, and other Republicans stop defending him and start attacking him before he's indicted, when he is showing some slippage and weakness...I don't know.
David Chalian
00:17:13
Yeah. My last question for you, since you have covered Trump for a decade now and talked to him for this book, I know you guys have reported about sort of the phone calls with Biden and Harris on the day after the election and the concession and all of that. Did you get a sense in talking to the president, whether or not he ever contemplated or was reflective about the fact that like they were doing something that he didn't afford Biden and Harris when they were coming in, that, you know, Biden inviting him to the White House or acknowledging defeat? Do you know if he, or in talking to his aides, like, if that was ever a moment for him of reflection about how he didn't approach it that way after.
Josh Dawsey
00:17:54
'You know, that's a good question. I never heard that from any of the conversations that I had with his aides. Some of his aides were certainly aware of that. When I interviewed him in Mar-a-Lago for the book, I must say I did not ask that question. Maybe I should have asked that question. We spent 30 minutes together for the book and, you know, it was very surreal being down there because the last time I had been to Mar-A-Lago for an interview, it had been in the GOP primary where he was very much still fighting back. I mean, there was no guarantees he was going to be president. A lot of folks were not around. And the day that I went to the club, 10 days before he was inaugurated, the club was teeming with visitors, would-be ambassadors, senators, hangers-on, everyone, right? But the most sort of remarkable thing to me, I'm sitting out in the lobby; there's all these couches in the lobby. It's a beautifully gold sort of ostentatious room, two white couches, gold ceilings, gold everywhere. And I'm sitting there, and there are all of these sort of rooms off of it, dining rooms, large dining rooms, private offices, around this lobby which is sort of the hub of Mar-a-Lago, and it's where everyone sort of stands and mills about to wait to see the President of the United States when he comes around. So Trump sees me sitting out in the lobby, I'm sitting there on my computer, and he's like, Josh, I'm gonna be a little late, you know why? And I'm like, why? And he goes, Mark Zuckerberg's in there. He whispers to me, he's like, Mark Zuckerberg's in there. I'm like, oh really? He's like, yeah, Zuckerberg. I'm like, okay, like, cool, I guess, right? And Zuckerberg, it was his second visit down there.
David Chalian
00:19:30
Clearly, Trump thought it was cool.
Josh Dawsey
00:19:32
He was mediating this case with him. And sure enough, I'm sitting there, and in a few minutes, Zuckerberg walks out, and then I'm sitting in the room with him, this sort of panoramic dining room overlooking the ocean. In the middle of our interview, Elon Musk walks in. This was when Elon and Trump were still sort of simpatico, and he's talking to him. And I said to Trump, I said, you know, you have basically, pardon my French here on your podcast, all these guys down here kissing your ass. Like, they're all signed up to be down here with you. And he was like, yeah, he was thinking if I lost, they wouldn't have been here, you know that, right? And I was like, yeah, I do know that. And he goes, and if I was him, I wouldn't have been here either. And he sort of realized like what his power was in that moment, right? That he had, he had chartered his comeback, and all of these people really wanted something from him again, and he had leverage.
David Chalian
00:20:20
Josh Dawsey, congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for all the excellent reporting and the insights. Really appreciate it.
Josh Dawsey
00:20:26
Thank you for having me.
David Chalian
00:20:28
That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. Remember, you can reach out to us with your questions about Trump's new administration. Our contact information is in the show notes. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Podcasts. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Dan Dzula is our Technical Director, and Steve Lickteig is the Executive Producer of CNN Podcasts. Our senior producers are Faiz Jamil and Felicia Patinkin. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.