Latest news with #JoshDawsey
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Business Standard
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Business Standard
2024: Could the US presidential election have gone any other way?
The authors end up arguing that things were not so fated, but reading what they have to report, I couldn't help feeling those political insiders had a point NYT 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America By Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf Published by Penguin Press 400 pages $32 In 2024, the latest 400-page dispatch from last year's presidential contest, the authors, a trio of veteran journalists from different august papers — Josh Dawsey (The Wall Street Journal), Tyler Pager (The New York Times) and Isaac Arnsdorf (The Washington Post ) — write that 'there was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it was started.' The authors end up arguing that things were not so fated, but reading what they have to report, I couldn't help feeling those political insiders had a point. In this account, Joe Biden's operation resembles its candidate: Listless, semi-coherent, sleepwalking toward calamity. It exists for its own sake, impervious to outside input, pushed along by inertia alone. The Trump campaign — at least after his first indictment provides a burst of energy and purpose — appears driven, disciplined, capable of evaluating trade-offs and making tough decisions. Trump seems to want to win; Biden just wants to survive. Things do change when Kamala Harris enters the fray. She gives Donald Trump a run for his money, but her campaign is held back from the start by the slow-moving disaster that made it necessary in the first place. 2024 is a well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Trump announced he was running for president again — at a Mar-a-Lago launch so disorganised and half-hearted, the authors write, that even sycophantic Trump allies admitted it was 'a dud.' I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book. I often winced at the generous — at times, egregious — use of dramatic irony, and I was not terribly eager to relive the fateful twists and turns of the 2024 election, which so recently deposited us in our dismal present. But that's hardly the authors' fault. (It's mine, for being a Democrat.) Trump was interviewed for the book; Biden answered a call briefly, before his aides evidently ran interference. Harris declined. Success, it is said, has many fathers, and failure is an orphan. In 2024, failure also has many prescient uncles who knew better, weren't listened to and thus can't be blamed for how the kid turned out. So it's no surprise that elected officials — the California representative Nancy Pelosi, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham — and aides from both campaigns go on record, or that many more provide background and anonymous swipes at their colleagues. There are also moments of levity. We hear that when an aide delivered a message from the Democratic convention production team to the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, asking him to smile more, he replied that he'd just gotten off the phone with his wife, who called from backstage to admonish him for laughing and talking too much! We also learn that an internal Trump strategy memo, designed with the candidate's sensitivities (and delusions) in mind, referred to his defeat in the 2020 election as 'our reported raw vote shortage.' The portions of the book covering the weeks after Biden's disastrous debate, however, are not funny. I was struck by Biden's hope that the progressives, with whom he had collaborated on domestic policy, would save his campaign. A little over a week after the debate, the authors write, Biden made a personal appeal to the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC and other progressives stuck with Biden in the days ahead as his political stock sank — apparently calculating that by buying Biden low, they could win his support for their policy goals. In 2024, Bernie Sanders, for his part, repeatedly advises Biden to change his position on Gaza to shore up support from young Democrats. Biden's behaviour, his saviour complex and megalomania, the increasingly emphatic argument that only he could beat Trump, his inner circle's refusal to believe unflattering data and his growing impulse to blame the media — all of it brings to mind the worst qualities of his rival. At one point, the authors report that Democratic aides schemed to have the political talk show host Joe Scarborough deliver the tough love. 'Staffers believed Biden would see the information if it came from 'Morning Joe,'' the authors write, just as Trump would often defer to the hosts of programmes like 'Fox and Friends' over his own advisers. Biden even has his own stolen election fantasy. In 2024, he repeatedly tells his allies that he could've beaten Trump. (The data suggests otherwise.) Mike Donilon — a long-time adviser who is something like Biden's id — tells the authors that pushing Joe out 'was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership.' For liberal readers, 2024 is a book of what-might-have-beens. That makes for a punishing read. But if we refuse to look for lessons in this depressing book, we might just keep becoming our own worst enemies.
CNN
11-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Behind the Scenes of Trump's Comeback - CNN Political Briefing - Podcast on CNN Podcasts
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.
Fox News
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Author of new Biden book details 'fierce' effort to insulate Biden on campaign trail
Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Josh Dawsey claimed that there was a "fierce" effort by some of former President Joe Biden's top aides to insulate the president from pollsters and even his campaign staff during his 2024 election bid. Dawsey told Democratic strategist James Carville and journalist Al Hunt on the "Politics War Room" podcast on Thursday that while some of Biden's aides had serious concerns about the president's viability as a candidate, other senior aides who "really bought in for a second term" fought to keep the president in the race "no matter what." The investigative reporter's new book, "How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America," was cited by Hunt, who noted the "myopic selfishness of Biden and his advisers" detailed in the book. "The folks who were around Biden, his sort of core group of aides, really kept a lot of information from him, kept a lot of people from him, particularly after, you know, that debate in June, sort of the disastrous infamous debate in June. And what we sort of found here was that there were lots of warning signs throughout the years 2023 and even early 2024, even before the debate," Dawsey told Hunt. According to Dawsey, both the Democratic Party and voters were done with Biden and "wanted to move on," but some of the president's closest aides worked tirelessly to ensure he stayed on the ticket. "They sort of, like, pushed him through, pushed him through. And then after the debate, even as there was a clamoring by senators, members of Congress, you know, everyone sort of under the sun, that it was time to go, there was a fierce effort by some of Biden's top aides, Steve Ricchetti, Michael Donilon and others, to keep the pollsters from meeting with him, to keep campaign staff from meeting with him, to keep a lot of the data information that they were getting from him," he said. "It was, it was a pretty aggressive insularity there that's sort of hard to describe," Dawsey added. Hunt questioned Dawsey about a section of his book where he describes that in the fall of 2023, some of Biden's closest aides were unable to meet with the president to discuss "the peril of his candidacy." "Well, a lot of what happened there was that in that period of time, that was when the attack with Hamas happened, right? And there was talk in 2023 after his interview with [Special Counsel] Robert Hur that obviously did not go well," he noted. "They were under some delusions that it wasn't that awful, but it did not go well." Dawsey added that the Biden campaign was struggling to get donors and fundraisers on board, and that "the numbers were really bad." "There was a conversation about whether or not they should ask the president, 'Do you really want to do this? Do you really want to spend four more years doing this?' And then the attack with Hamas happens, and they sort of never bring that conversation up to him," he stated. When asked who specifically was trying to meet with the president but couldn't, Dawsey told Hunt that there was a "core group" of people who had concerns but couldn't voice them directly to Biden, including his former senior advisor Anita Dunn. "There were other aides on the campaign side that were really concerned. I think Donilon and Ricchetti were the only ones, to the best of our knowledge, of senior folks who were really bought in on a second term and wanted to keep it going no matter what," he detailed. "And probably Anthony Bernal, I would also put in that category, and obviously the first lady." Representatives for Joe Biden, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn and Anthony Bernal did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Daily Mail
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Biden aides' drastic action to stop ailing president from talking to reporters
Joe Biden 's aides changed his personal phone number and 'screamed' at a reporter after the president picked up a rogue phone call from a journalist seeking an interview, a new book claims. The former president reportedly picked up a random number he didn't recognize soon after leaving office, sparking panic among his inner circle. The reporter on the other line was Tyler Pager of The New York Times, who writes in his new book alongside Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post that the episode sent Biden's aides scrambling. Pager said that he got hold of Biden's personal number in March, and when he cold called the president, 'Biden said he would be willing to speak for this book the next day.' The book - titled How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America - claims that Biden then laid into his successor Donald Trump when he answered a call the next morning. 'I don't see anything he's done that's been productive,' Biden reportedly fumed. Pager said soon after the call, he received a flurry of calls and texts from Biden's staff, questioning how he got the number and screaming at him. When he tried to call Biden again the next day, Pager said that the number was dead, and a Verizon voicemail said it was 'no longer in service.' Pager said that in his initial call with Biden, he asked the president if he regretted dropping out of the 2024 presidential election after Biden slammed Trump's first months in office. 'No, not now,' Biden reportedly answered. 'I don't spend a lot of time on regrets.' The reporter said that Biden then hung up as he said he had to board an Amtrak train. As Biden rode the Amtrak, a common sight in Washington DC since he has left office, Pager said Biden's staff immediately began berating him. 'Furious Biden aides repeatedly called and texted,' he said. Pager said that one aide screamed at him, and 'others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden's phone number.' Before the line went dead within two days of the initial call, Pager said that his follow-up calls to Biden went straight to voicemail, where the president appeared to say his name 'Joe' before callers could leave a message. In an excerpt of the book shared to The New York Times this week, Pager said his repeated requests to make good on Biden's offer to help the book were subsequently rebuffed. He said that the president's aides told him Biden was working on a memoir that would clash with the upcoming book. Pager's book - titled How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America - claims that Biden then laid into his successor Donald Trump when he answered a call. 'I don't see anything he's done that's been productive,' Biden reportedly fumed The report comes amid mounting scrutiny on the alleged tight grip that Biden's inner circle kept over him while he was in the White House. Biden was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in May, leading many to question how the commander-in-chief's illness went undetected for years until it had already spread to his bones. Amid further allegations that Biden's aides covered up his apparent cognitive decline, the Republican-led Congress held hearings on Wednesday into the alleged cover-up of Biden's health in office. In the hearings, Biden's personal physician Dr Kevin O'Connor pleaded the fifth amendment protection against 'self-incrimination' during his testimony. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, who subpoenaed O'Connor, said that the doctor's decision to plead the fifth shows 'there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden's cognitive decline.' Biden's personal physician Dr Kevin O'Connor pleaded the fifth amendment protection against 'self-incrimination' during his testimony on Wednesday as he was called to Congress for a probe into Biden's apparent cognitive decline in office 'It's now clear there was a conspiracy to cover up President Biden's cognitive decline after Dr. Kevin O'Connor, Biden's physician and family business associate, refused to answer any questions and chose to hide behind the fifth amendment,' Comer said in a statement. 'Dr. O'Connor took the fifth when asked if he was told to lie about President Biden's health and whether he was fit to be President of the United States.' O'Connor cited patient privilege as his reason for pleading the fifth. His lawyer, ahead of his testimony, expressed concern about what O'Connor would be able to say without violating doctor-patient confidentiality laws. The physician was in charge of Biden's annual physical and repeatedly deemed Biden fit to hold office. Republicans charge the former president's inner circle engaged in a conspiracy to hide cognitive decline.
Fox News
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
New book sheds light on Harris decision to pick Walz as her running mate over Shapiro: 'Went with her gut'
A new book on the end of Joe Biden's presidential campaign and the birth of Kamala Harris' sheds light on the process behind the vice president choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a decision widely panned by pundits in retrospect. "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America," released Tuesday by journalists Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of The New York Times and Isaac Arnsdor of The Washington Post, described a vetting process that came down to three finalists: Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. All three candidates did a final interview with Harris at her residence, the book explains, adding that when asked what they wanted to drink, Shapiro and Kelly chose water while Walz chose Diet Mountain Dew. Appeal with rural voters was a top priority for the Harris ticket and the book states that Harris's advisors felt that Walz was the best candidate to do that. "Pelosi privately pushed for him too, because she'd worked with him in Congress," the book said about the former House speaker. "The pitch for Walz was straightforward: He could appeal to white voters across the Blue Wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) and hopefully help Harris with male voters. He'd never lost election." While most political experts felt Shapiro, governor of a key swing state, was the most logical choice, the book states that the interview with Harris and Shapiro "revealed the two were not a perfect match." "He came across as overly ambitious, pushing Harris to define what his role would be. He also conceded it would not be natural for him to serve as someone's number two, leaving Harris with a bad impression," the book states. Conversely, the authors explain that Walz was "deferential" while "showing no interest in himself" and "flatly denied any interest in running for president." "He went so far as to proactively volunteer reasons why she might not want to pick him," the book says. "In his interview that Friday, he said he had never used a teleprompter before. On Sunday, he told Harris, 'I would understand if you went with someone else because I'm really nervous about the debate, and I don't think I'll do well.' Still, the vetting team did not fully appreciate his tendency to misspeak, his folksiness sometimes tipping into factual imprecision." Walz would ultimately draw intense scrutiny on the campaign trail for his "folksiness" with a series of blunders, including his characterization of his military service and a claim he was present at the Tiananmen Square massacre. The book says Harris "struggled" deciding between Shapiro and Walz, believing that she had a better "rapport" with Walz but understood the importance of Pennsylvania. Harris' team, according to the book, told her that polling did not offer a clear answer as to which of the two candidates would help the ticket more. "There was no empirical evidence that Shapiro would deliver Pennsylvania and with it the White House," the book said. As Shapiro was being considered, many pundits speculated that his staunch support of Israel could be an issue given the progressive wing of the Democratic Party being vocally pro-Palestinian, resulting in protests, sometimes violent, across the country after Oct. 7. The book said the Harris campaign was aware of that issue. "Much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party declared war on Shapiro, largely because of his support of Israel," the book said. "Some Shapiro allies saw the criticism as deeply unfair and borderline antisemitic, since the governor was an observant Jew, but his positions on the Palestinian conflict broadly aligned with the Biden administration and the other vice presidential contenders. The lawyers vetting Shapiro did flag some comments they viewed as more incendiary, particularly as it related to pro- Palestinian protests on college campuses after the October 7 attacks." "One that caught their attention was his commentary on CNN from April: 'We have to query whether or not we would tolerate this, if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia, making comments about people who are African American in our communities.'" Ultimately, the book says Harris "went with her gut" and chose Walz believing he was the "better fit" in a decision her staff was "unanimously behind." Fox News Digital reached out to the offices of Walz and Shapiro for comment. After losing every battleground state and ultimately the presidency to Donald Trump, critics were quick to judge the Walz pick as a misstep by Harris. "The choice of Walz was only one of many disastrous mistakes but symptomatic of one larger problem – the Democratic Party leadership is too scared to say no to the hard-left progressive wing of the party," Julian Epstein, longtime Democratic operative and former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News Digital shortly after the election. Rob Bluey, president and executive editor of The Daily Signal, told Fox News Digital in November that Harris picking Walz "proved to be a disastrous decision that doomed Kamala Harris from the moment she made it." "Not only was Walz ill-prepared for the national spotlight and media scrutiny, but Harris passed over several better options," Bluey said. "Given how little Americans knew about Harris or her policy positions, they were right to question her judgment on this big decision."
