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We spend so much time talking about the horse race, the policy proposals, of course, the debate this week, some of the wild rhetoric that we heard on the stump in the last forty eight hours. We don't always think about the job that they're working for. And the latest from David Rubinstein, the highest Calling. We've both been curled up with this book for a minute conversations on the
American presidency. You start reading about all of the presidents, including by the way, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I'm left with the same question, why would anyone ever want this job?
Yeah, very difficult one, of course, perhaps the most difficult to attain, at least in American politics, in the way in which this republic operates, and of course one that may be held differently, viewed differently by the people who have inhabited the office as you look over the history of the now forty six presidents, and twenty of them featured in this new book. And we're very lucky to
have David Rubinstein, the author here with us. He of course, is co founder and co chair of the Carlisle Grouve, also a host on Bloomberg Television in addition to being an author of this book. Always a busy man. Thank you for making some time for us here in studio in Washington. It's worth pointing out while this is in part titled Conversations on the American Presidency, it's also conversations with a number of former and even the current president.
You spoke with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden when writing this book. We talk a lot about the contrast between these two men. Did you pick up on how they made differently view the office of the Presiden's here with there more overlap than you expected.
They do have different views on it and how to do it. I interviewed both of them on separate interviews, with Joe Biden in the Oval Office for an hour alone, and I've known him for a long time, and I think he felt comfortable with me, and I've had a lot of interactions with him over the years. I've interviewed
Donald Trump before. In this particular case, he was getting ready for a trial, and so it wasn't exactly in the Oval Office that I was doing it, but I had had dinner with him not too long earlier and had gotten ready for the interview, and they both have different perspectives on the job. And I might call it the highest calling because this is clearly the most important
job in the world. Since Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versilles, it's been clear that the President United States is the most important person in the world, with very rare exceptions. And so you have to say to yourself, why do people want that much responsibility? You asked in the beginning, and think about it. John Kennedy was assassinated, Lynda Johnson driven out of office.
Richard Nixon in fact had to force to resign.
Gerald Ford lost reelection, Jimmy Carter lost reelection, Ronald Reagan was almost assassinated. George Herbert Walker Bush not reelected. So you have to say, why do people want to put themselves through this and to be president? You have now spent two years campaigning bad food, no exercise, no family contact, and it's not a.
Wonderful thing to do.
But the reason is that people who are ambitious say, I want to do something to help my country. I want to show that I've done something useful for society. And it's the ultimate job in the world.
For sure.
Then after that big fight, you get there and you realize the golden bars surround you. You talk to both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I'm compelled, I believe. On two pages facing each other, Donald Trump talked about the loneliness. You askedten, what does it like to be in the White House? The loneliness? You asked Joe Biden, is this as fun a job as you thought it was going to be? He said, fun is not the word that I would use. Maybe they have something in common there.
Well, every president thinks it's lonely because in the end, every major decision that the federal government has to make and it's difficult, it gets the president because it was easy to make a decision about something they would have gotten incided by somebody else. Yeah, so they get it's lonely, and it's said to be a very lonely job. And what Donald Trump was referring to is that in several
holidays the government was more or less shut down. He had to stay there to wait for the government to open up and maybe sign a bill.
So he didn't go down.
To mar A Lago for I think it was three of the four years he was in the White House alone during the holidays, and you know, Joe Biden has spent a fair amount of time there in long hours as well. One of the reasons presidents like Camp David is you can go there, you are with your family typically, but you don't have all the Secret Service watching you every second, you know, And it's not quite the federal prison that the White House is often called by people.
Ronald Reagan said it was the, I guess, the high water mark of the federal penitentiary system, because when you're in the White House, everybody watches everything you do. You can't walk around outside. It's a very complicated and lonely job. But again, many people spend time trying to get there, and a lot of people want that job.
Well, and Joe Biden wanted to keep the job up until just recently. You spoke with him in April of this year, so he still was attempting to seek a second term at that time. Do you think the tenor of your conversation would have been different had he already made the decision to not seek reelection and endorse Kamala Harrison.
Probably sure he thought he was going to be the nominee of the party, and he wanted to be the nominee the party, and obviously events unfolded. When history of this election is written, the two most consequential decisions I think will be Donald Trump's decision to do an early debate, because by doing an early debate, he in effect knocked Biden out and therefore he now has an opponent that.
Might be tougher.
And Joe Biden's decision to ask for an early debate, because had he not had an early debate and the debate was in September October would have been too late to have him replaced. Probably, so both of them will probably look back, depending who wins, and say, maybe I shouldn't have had an early debate.
You dedicated this book in part to Ted Sorenson, which is fascinating to me. Of course the force behind, as we've learned, profiles and courage, but also JFK's inaugural address that we choose to go to the moon speech. Before you joined us, Kayley and I were talking about migrants eating animals in Springfield, Ohio? What would Ted Sorenson make of the rhetoric on this campaign?
Ted Sorenson, for those who don't know, was a very young aide who worked for President Kennedy before that for sen Kennedy, and he was the person who was probably very involved in writing let's say, Profiles and courage President Kennedy or then Senric Kenny was ill, probably difficult to write too much of it himself. And then the inaugural a dress, which I think was the greatest inaugural dress of my lifetime, was written in large part by Ted Sorenson,
and I admired him. I didn't think I could be a candidate. I wasn't rich enough, smart enough, handsome enough, charming enough.
To be a candidate. But I thought I could be an advisor.
And so he was the person I went to work for when I practiced when I began practicing law in New York. And you know, I greatly admire him. I was just with his widow the other night when I was doing a talk about this book in New York. And you know, Ted was an inspiration to me because he knew how to write in a way that very few people have been able to do since then. He
just had a way with words. And if you think of the inaugural address that Kennedy gave, ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country. Those are words that you know are going to ring with us for the rest of our lives.
Would he see this as a world in which political rhetoric has regressed though these are poetic speeches you're talking about.
Turned to twenty twenty four.
We don't value presidential rhetoric in quite the way that we probably used to. You know, we used to talk about great presidential speeches Lincoln's second inaugural dress, FDR's inaugural dress, the first one, or Kenny's in augur dress. Today we often don't focus on the rhetoric as much or the speeches because the craftsmanship is not quite as fine tuned. But there's not as much emphasis on it being fine tuned. People just wanted to know what is the president going
to do, what's it going to do for me? And that kind of thing. And it's a different world. Remember when John Kenny gave his speech inaugural address. In those days, there was no internet, there was no social media. The evening news shows for fifteen minutes. There were three networks, each one did fifteen minutes a night, and then the only papers that people cared about were the Washington Posts in New York Times. There was no other way to worry about conveying ideas, and so it was a different
world today. If you're President of United States, you're working in the White House. Every minute, you have to focus on social media who's saying what, and you have to be attuned to what's going on all around the world, and you never really are are free from social media or TV networks.
Never well.
And that's one of the ways in which the office perhaps has changed, is you look from George Washington to present day. One thing, though, has remained the same. Every single person you talk about in this book is a man that potentially could change. If Kamala Harris wins in November, does that change the nature of the office once what Hillary Clinton called that highest glass ceiling has actually been shattered.
Of course, you think about it. We've had forty six men serve in this position, no women. Interestingly, when the country was set up, women weren't even allowed to vote or in any way participate in government. We obviously changed that with the Night of the Amendment. It is amazing that you have more than half the population's female, but we still haven't and had a female president, we may well
this time, who knows. I think Hillary Clinton came as close as any woman has ever come, because had she won one or two more states, she would have been president United States and we would have broken that glass ceiling to.
Hear your view on this race. Now, everybody wants to know what's on your mind. And I'm sure there are some things you can tell us, and maybe you don't want to share, but you understand the conversation on Wall Street. What is the great fear right now when it comes to Kamala Harris, is that the idea of taxing capital gains on unrealized gains. Wall Street seems to be more comfortable with the idea of Trump, despite a pretty well performing stock market under the Biden administration.
Well, I'll tell you what I think people think, but I don't want to say these are my views necessarily, but people on Wall Street, and remember Wall Street generally is focused on stock market and making money and other things, not kind of values that a president might have. But they're worried that taxes will go up on businesses, and wealthy businesses they're worried that and wealthy individuals. They're worried
that the regulatory environment will be very harsh. The anti trust environment has not been favorable for a lot of M and A transactions, and they're worried that it might continue that way. They're worried that the people that she might put into regulatory positions might be tougher on business than even the ones that Joe Biden put in.
So that's what they're worried about.
I'm not sure I share all those worries, but I think many people on Wall Street saying, look, we have to hedge our bats, and Wall Street is all about hedging, right, So they are focused very much on the Senate because the Senate can very well go Republican. You only need to switch one or two seats if we go Republican.
And so if the Senate were to go Republican and with the filler buster rules, I think many people in Wall Street who don't like Kamala Harris would say, well, we can block almost anything through the Senate.
Well, and that's what we'd have to keep reminding ourselves is we get these various policy proposals from these candidates, there is only so much they can do on their own without Congress backing them. So it's important to remind ourselves of rules that have to be followed as far as how legislating goes. I want to ask you about a rule completely unrelated to politics, though, but related to of course your interest in sports as an owner of teams like the Orioles. There's a new rule in the
NFL that allows private equity. In Bloomberg's reporting today, the Chargers the Dolphins are now getting interest. Is this something you're looking at, David Well.
I would say that it was public public disclosed that the firm that I'm the co chairman of, Carlisle, is part of a CONSORTI that has been authorized by the NFL to buy stakes that go up to ten percent, And so all I can say is what's been said already in the press. But I do think that sports have been a very attractive investment for the last couple of years. Very few people have made major sports investments that have lost money. Now, some people say it's a bubble,
it can't keep going on this way. The other hand, nobody seems to be running away from the bubble. And one of the reasons is that sports is now global and because betting has occurred, and betting is now very popular betting has fueled I think interest in sports, and so people are much more interested in sports than when I was a child because there's betting involved, is in addition to rooting for your home team.
So I as you know, I bought the Bottom.
Oriils or control of the Bottom Oriols with partners recently, and I'm now learning the ins and outs of what it means to be a sports owner. And you know, every time we win, I'm feeling deliriously happy, that you know, and when we lose, I feel like the dagger in my heart. And so you know, I wish I know I was a junior. I was a Little League All Star when I was eight years old, and I feel like going into the players and say, look, let me tell you what I learned when I was eight years
old about how to hit or how to pitch. But they don't seem that interested.
We only have a minute left. I'm a huge fan.
I know you are too, Kailee of peer to peer, I know what my favorite episodes are.
What's been your favorite interview in this experiment?
When I did Oprah, it was pretty interesting because she said to be a great interviewer. She says, I'm not a great interviewer. I'm a great listener. And she's right because you have to learn what person is saying and then pivot. And that was really interesting. I did George Bush and Bill Clinton together one time and that was, I think, really good. And Warren Buffett was great when I did him. So I like all my interviews. So it's like I luck all my children, right, So I
don't think anyone is more of a favorite. But what I like the best is when I know the person reasonably well. Yeah, and when you try to use my sense of humor, they play along with it. You know, when somebody it doesn't pick up that I'm asking a joke, it's not as much fun. So like when I asked one time Bill Gates, do you think of he had a college degree, you might be more successful in life.
He didn't get that it was a joke and he gave a serious answer. So you know, I like people that can pick up on the joke. Sometimes that's great.
The humor goes a long way around here.
I have to say, by the way, the McDonald's CEO, why does the coke taste better?
At that?
I learned something whenever I watch peer to peer David Rubinstein, a great treat to have you at the table.
Congrats on the book.
It's called The Highest Calling, Conversations on the American Presidency