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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the day. So it's just amazing how much that Joe Biden has been in the news over the last few days for all the wrong reasons. For the past few days. Damaging new details tonight about former President Biden. A new book alleges serious concerns about his mental...
It was, quote, obvious to many at a fundraiser last summer that then President Biden did not know who George Clooney was. They basically were terrified that Biden was going to have to be in a wheelchair before the election.
spurred on by two new books titled original sin president biden's decline its cover-up and his disastrous choice to run again three reporters were at this book it's called 2024 how trump retook the white house and the democrats lost america democrats began to undertake a painful re-examination of what went wrong with Joe Biden's presidency His campaign for reelection the Democratic Party needs to be honest
It's painfully obvious President Biden should not have run. And the Trump White House eagerly added fuel to the fire. by releasing embarrassing audio of Biden being interviewed by a government lawyer. In that audio tape, you hear President Biden rambling, unable to keep a train of thought, getting dates wrong. This is adding even more fodder to... to accusations of a wide-ranging cover-up involving Biden's inner circle. Now, amid that reckoning, Biden himself
has disclosed that he's been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a Gleason score of 9 with metastasis. Biden and his family are now reviewing his treatment options. Today, we try to make sense of all of that and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party. With three of my colleagues. Tyler Pager, Lisa Lair, and Reed Edwards. It's Tuesday, May 20th.
Let us get started. Tyler, Lisa and Reid, thank you for making time for us. appreciate it it's good to see you michael welcome tyler to the daily Long-time fan, first-time participant. I'm thrilled to be here. as we're hinting at lisa and reid are veterans of this format and tyler you are the new face in the daily universe and in particular the roundtable format you came to us
very recently from the Washington Post where we all read your work with admiration and at times with deep envy. So welcome aboard. Thanks so much for having me. So, totally, I suspect we're going to be radically changing gears here. And that's because of the very serious news that we got within the last 48 hours or so about former President Biden. I wonder what all three of you were thinking when you learned that He has cancer and a very aggressive and serious form.
Well, look, of course, I thought that this is something that must be devastating for the former president, devastating for his family. This is a family that has gone through perhaps more than their share of health crises. But I must say that along with my sympathies, I was slightly taken aback when it became clear how far along the cancer was. given the resources that he has to doctors and healthcare that it wasn't caught earlier was a little bit surprising to me.
Tyler, what was your reaction? Yeah, this is something that my colleague Sean McCrish and I had actually been tracking a little bit because about a week ago, Biden was in a Philly area hospital. And we learned that that was because there was a small module found on his prostate. We had very few details beyond that. But because of that, I had been following up almost every day with the Biden folks to get a better sense of exactly what the diagnosis might be from that discovery.
but I don't think any of us expected it to be this severe in nature. When I saw this on Sunday afternoon, it felt like another piece of terrible news for Joe Biden. It's a very serious diagnosis. And I think there was an enormous... outpouring of sympathy for him to be as sick as they say he is at this point in his life
At the same time, it's hard to divorce that from the weakened change that preceded it, which was just an unending string of bad news for the former president. Right. I mean, traditionally... This kind of information would sit outside of a political context or a debate. A former president being diagnosed with metastatic cancer, a really serious, aggressive form of cancer.
But that wasn't really the case here because this information came at a moment when the entire Democratic Party has been openly discussing how much blame Biden and those around him deserve for the party losing the White House and how the Democratic Party can repair a very damaged reputation that they think Biden helped inflict on it.
And that's a conversation that, as we all know, started back in the fall when Trump won, but it has been turbocharged in the past week or so by the emergence of two books. Tyler, you're the co-author of one of them. And I want to just explain the context into which this diagnosis came. separate this from the reality that the party has been having a conversation about Biden's health and what people knew about his health.
and what some of the people closest to him, both his aides and other elected officials who are close allies, kind of what they knew about how capable he was of performing the duties of the presidency and what the gap might have been between that reality and what people said to the public. And so this is getting thrown on top of that conversation, almost like pouring gasoline on a fire. People still feel deep empathy for him and feel sad that he is going through this.
But I think it also fits in with the anger that a lot of Democrats have at former President Biden and the people closest to him who protected and abetted him throughout this process. And I think an even more important dynamic here is almost since Biden won the presidency in 2020, Democratic voters have been saying again and again in every way they can in polling and interviews that they believed. was too old and was unfit to hold the office.
And then here you are, four months after the man leaves office, he comes out with a public diagnosis of very serious cancer that would, in fact, make him fairly unfit to hold the office. And that whole time, while Democratic voters were saying this in polling and everywhere else, Democratic officials were insisting that he was fine. So there's this dynamic in the party where voters, Democratic voters, feel misled. by their own leaders
And now in some ways it appears that they are getting confirmation of their belief. And that's a really difficult political dynamic. Democrats and one that is really unclear how they will tackle and solve for in the coming years, especially now that it's a little bit harder to speak openly about the former president because there are such mixed feelings. People feel really badly that he's so ill. I mean, many Democrats
deeply love President Biden and respect the work he did as president. So it's a very complicated, difficult situation for the party. Right. And Tyler, I want you to talk about some of the revelations that have come out in the past week or two that, as you said, Lisa, seem to, for many, confirm some of the worst fears about Biden's.
fitness for a second term. And as I said, Tyler, you helped write and report one of the books that brought forth some of these revelations. So you're now tasked with beginning to summer. Yeah, and there's a whole host of different types of revelations that fall into various buckets. One, you know, Michael, as you mentioned, from the book that I co-wrote with former colleagues at the Washington Post, Revealed that some of Biden's closest aides debated before his final physical as president
whether they should have him submit for a cognitive test as part of his physical. They were adamant that he would not fail the cognitive test, but thought that maybe it would help. prove to the American people that he was fit to run for office. Ultimately, they decided not to do so. in part because they worried it would raise more questions, particularly around why he would take a cognitive test if they didn't think there were any.
problems there. Fascinating. Some of the other revelations relate to his memory and his ability to interact with other people particularly as it relates to faces and names. One of the books recounts a scene at the infamous fundraiser in California.
in part hosted by George Clooney in which the famous actor relates that the president did not recognize him and had to be prompted by an aide. One of the most recognizable human beings in the world absolutely who has a long-standing relationship with the president that dates back decades george clooney is very active in democratic politics and someone that had a personal relationship with joe biden
And there are similar scenes across books that show the president forgetting certain staffers and even lawmakers' names and other key dates. Right. In a lot of ways, these two books are coloring in a portrait that we had already started to see with our own eyes and ears as journalists.
and members of the public watching this president at the end of his term, but there's now a tremendous amount of new detail. I mean, I was struck by something that you wrote, Reid, in a summary of one of the books in which allies of the president worried that he might soon need a wheelchair if he were elected to a second term. There's reporting about cabinet gatherings that became scripted for Biden even when no one from the public could see them so that he could stay on message.
Yeah, I was actually talking to somebody today who said that the donor events for the president were so scripted that they not only chose the donors who would ask Biden questions in these private settings, but they just gave the donors questions and asked who wanted to ask. Which question?
And so Biden knew both the questions, and of course he was given the answers in advance too. And part of the reason this story has been so complicated for Democrats is because Biden's performances were uneven and complicated.
Sometimes Democrats said he did quite well. They point to the state of the unions in 2023 and 2024, where they were impressed by his performance. And others said, in key moments, particularly as it related to national security matters, they saw him really turned on and engaged. And I think that's part of the challenge for Democrats is disentangling certain moments of Biden's presidency from the vast majority of others, particularly in the latter half of his term.
where there were moments of great concern that are now just coming to light. You're getting at something that I now want to turn to, which is a phrase that's in the title of one of these books by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which is the word cover. The implication being that Biden's decline was intentionally hidden from the public until it became impossible not to see and discuss. during the first debate he had with Trump. I mean...
What do we make of that word? Does it feel like the right word? If it's not the right word, then what is the... for what essentially was going on here. I mean, look, if this was a cover-up, it was an extremely bad one. Because a majority of voters in America were saying, in poll after poll, this guy is unfit to leave the country for another term. So it was not a very successful cover-up, if it was a cover-up.
I do think what was successful is an ability to sort of bully their way through the party and convince the entire Democratic Party that they were better off with a sitting president. and basically dissuading any other powerful Democrat from jumping into challenge Biden by saying, look, you won't be able to raise the money. You're not going to be able to mount a campaign. It's just going to make everyone in the party dislike you.
On that front, they were very, very successful. Was that a cover-up? I'm really not that sure, because voters certainly told us that they knew what was going on here, and they were not comfortable with it. Read whether or not this is a cover-up or strong-arming or some form of very willful ignorance.
It's all the revelations and details we're talking about here coming out over the past week or so that lead several high-profile Democrats to start to talk more openly, largely because they're being asked by reporters, but they start to talk more openly about what happened in 2024 with Biden. And as best I could tell, their instinct is to be more candid than they were during the campaign.
We saw Pete Buttigieg made his return to the political sphere. He did a town hall event in Iowa, of all places. Gracias. Would the party have been better off if he had just not run for re-election? Maybe. He didn't quite go all the way. He took a baby step. And right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that's the case.
and said maybe it would have been a good idea if Biden hadn't stayed in the race for so long and they had a primary. We saw Chris Murphy, a very ambitious senator from Connecticut. Obviously, in retrospect, the president should have gotten out of the race earlier. Who made a personal vouching for Biden's mental fitness as late as February or March of last year. Like anybody who reaches that stage in their life, there is some level of diminishment.
Say that it was obvious that he suffered some sort of decline in his acuity. We played too much deference to party leaders, to the old guard, to the advisors. We've seen Ro Khanna, who was an ambitious... Biden surrogate who would go anywhere. the last four or five days before Biden dropped out, vouched for him. Now, I do believe that some of us should have pushed back more. I think that that is the lesson that I learned. Saying that...
People like him who campaigned for Biden were wrong to do so. Before you go any further, Why does it matter, to the degree that it does, that leading Democrats, and you used the word ambitious, and perhaps these are folks who see themselves as the next party leader president, Why is it important, or is it, that they are saying this at all, even if they're saying it rather late? Look, the Democratic Party's approval ratings are historically low.
And former President Biden's decision to run for re-election is not the only reason they are so low. But it's our reason. Yeah, there are many Democrats who think that they lost trust with their voters. And, you know, and that... tanked how voters view them and how Americans view the party that this loss of trust is really important and the party has to confront it.
I think it also comes at this larger reckoning with transparency and health around elected officials. Many of the most senior elected officials in our country are quite old. And so I think as the public reckons with what that means for the country's leadership. and especially as Democrats are without a clear leader. We're entering into this period where Democrats
are going to start jockeying to run for president. It's already sort of spilled out into the open, and I think they feel that there is a certain reckoning that needs to happen over the public statements, as Reid and Lisa just outlined, that they made. over the last several years about what they thought about Joe Biden's ability to lead the country and what they have since learned about it.
What Biden is fighting for here is his legacy. And what Democrats are fighting for is really the future of their party. And they're trying to come out of this political wilderness and rebuild. And those incentives are not aligned. And I think we're seeing some of that play out. With these books, with the release of the audio from the special counsel interview with Robert Herr, we're seeing these differing ambitions sort of play out in the public stage.
Well, we're gonna go to break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about... Lisa, what you just started to mention, which is the manner in which the Trump administration decided to try to put its thumb on the scale of this moment and all the questions around Biden's decision to run for a second term and his. which is the audio that was leaked in the past couple days. We'll do that. I'm Emily Badger. I'm a reporter with the New York Times.
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If you'd like to become a subscriber, head to nytimes.com slash subscribe. You need to see the animated floor plans in this piece. Lisa, Reed, Tyler, welcome back. We had understood for quite some time that when President Biden sat down with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents,
after he left his role as vice president, that the interview did not go all that well. We knew that because the special counsel wrote a report in which he said it did not go very well for Joe Biden. But Tyler, I want you to explain why we just heard this audio at all. Yeah, so the interview occurred in 2023. And after that, in 2024, the special counsel released his report, and we got a full transcript of Biden's interview with the special counsel, and it spanned more than five hours.
But the Biden administration fought Republican efforts to release the audio. And so when Donald Trump was elected president, it was not a... stretched to believe that the Trump administration would be willing to release the entire audio. Is it clear that the Trump administration recognized that this was a moment that was fertile because of the books and the debate and the entire re-examination going on within the Democratic Party. Is that what happened here?
It's a great question. It's not a stretch to believe that in this current moment, when there was a lot of conversation about Joe Biden's mental acuity, that the Trump administration would capitalize on that. And Lisa, you've actually listened, I believe, to the entire... five hours of this recording, and I'm curious what your experience of it was. Well, look, a transcript had been released over a year ago, so there was no revelation in that way, but...
There is something really different about hearing Joe Biden's voice and hearing how the interview played out. The date is October 8, 2023. The time is approximately 12.15 p.m. And this is an interview with President Joseph Biden. You know, in some ways, it's deeply human. You hear a man who is struggling to recall details. Well, I don't know. who has troubles telling a story chronologically.
who kind of goes on these tangents when asked a question. And you listen to these tapes and this is a man who can't remember. how he moved from the Naval Observatory, where he served as Vice President, to his house in Northern Virginia. He doesn't know who packed his boxes. It got moved into the garage. Well, it was 2013. Oh. When did I stop your vice president? 2017.
And some of the things he struggles to recall are quite surprising. He needs prompting by his lawyers to remember what year he left the White House. He doesn't remember the date of his son Beau's death, which was really a turning point moment in Biden's life. I mean, this is something that impacted him and his family greatly. And you just listen to that tape and certainly one wonders how this man could be the leader of the country and the free world. All right, that's a lot of work.
And I think one of the most remarkable things is what you hear when you talk to Biden's closest aides about that interview. I've done a lot of reporting about the her investigation and that interview specifically. And in the aftermath, when I talked to some of Biden's closest aides who were either in the room or briefed on the conversation, they said the interview went fine. They said it was Biden being Biden.
It's Biden telling stories, Biden zigging and zagging. And they thought it wasn't his best performance. There were some... concerns they had about his inability to recall certain dates. and specific events, but they really said, That is just Joe Biden being Joe Biden, the sort of politician storyteller he's always been. That's fascinating. And in some ways, this is so deeply human, right? Like, who among us have not watched an elderly parent or grandparent aid?
And you don't always see it while it's happening because you're spending so much time with them that you can't necessarily see the markers when they come. And you do have to wonder whether these aids who were not only with biden every single day but some of these people had been with him for decades these were his closest aides and confidence and they were so loyal to him just didn't
see the signs of age in the same way that maybe people who weren't with him all the time did. I want to just talk about how the horror saga ends, because I think it speaks to what you're all suggesting. Robert Hurr finishes this interview and then writes a report. in which he says, I believe that charges against Biden for the way he handled classified documents are in order, but that a jury wouldn't ever be willing to convict him because he seems like someone who's
Not entirely with it. I mean, that was the essence of what He concluded, and after that report came out, those around Biden attacked her. They said, you are a partisan. Some suggested he was basically a hack, that he bore ill will towards Biden. And today, all these months later, it seems like that...
in theory be part of an effort to hide something, to attack the messenger rather than grapple with the realities of what was happening in that room. But I hear you all saying that those who were doing that attacking against her might have believed. that this was normal for Biden and that there was sort of nothing to see here. Is that what I hear you're saying? Or should we think of what those allies of Biden attempted to do to her as something approaching an effort at a cover?
I think It is absolutely that the vast majority of people closest to Biden genuinely believe the portrait that Robert Herr painted of him was deeply unfair. And I think it's in part because they saw Joe Biden in different settings and all the time. And there were times where he was really strong and dialed in and capable. They would say, if you could just hear Joe Biden on a foreign leader call.
or if you could just see Joe Biden in this negotiation, or if you could just see Joe Biden in X, Y, or Z setting. But the problem was the public rarely saw that version of Joe Biden. In fact, the public rarely saw Joe Biden much at all. And so I think the challenge for Biden's closest aides was confronting the reality.
of the Joe Biden that outsiders saw, that Joe Biden that Robert Hur saw, the Joe Biden that many voters saw, and ultimately the Joe Biden that America saw when he stepped on that debate stage in Atlanta, Georgia with Donald Trump. But that's a reality they had created with the pretty stingy way in which they partialed him out to the public. Totally. And I don't want to downplay what these tapes sound like. The presidency is a thing that is cloaked in power from the rest of your desk.
to the plane to all of it that is like the symbolism of the presidency and i think that was the concern his aides may have believed that he was capable of doing the job but they certainly also knew that he didn't look all that good doing it And of course, this is the conversation, including and especially in the last couple of days about this audio that has been made public of that interview, that precedes the news. that Biden has cancer. And I'm curious, what is the reaction from Democrats?
given this larger context that we've been discussing. We haven't seen any polling yet. So let's put a pin in like what normal voters think about this. But people are saying today, after living through the last 72 hours, is that it's really a microcosm of how they feel about Biden. They're angry at him for how he ran the race while he was still in it, that he stayed in it for as long as he did, that he insisted on running in the first place.
They have deep sympathy for his physical condition now that he appears to be pretty sick with cancer. and they are conflicted about his legacy. and whether it's going to be... somebody who did a bunch of things in office that they're proud of, or a guy who ran and stayed in a race for much longer than he should have, delivering the country again to Donald Trump.
The folks I've talked to today, some of whom worked on the Biden campaign, some of whom were involved with 2024 in other ways, have a lot of questions. They want to know why didn't he get the blood test that would determine if he was sort of headed towards prostate cancer the PSA he did just to make clear what you're saying he did not have the traditional PSA test earlier that might have caught
Yeah, and I think these people who really suspended their lives to work on the 2024 campaign for an extended period of time really want to know when he was diagnosed, what he knew, and how responsible. former President Biden was being with his health. In a normal world, if somebody reveals that they have a terrible health diagnosis,
It's really just a lot of sympathy and people feel bad for them and then that's it. Of course. But this is all complicated by the fact that we were discussing Biden's health and how forthcoming or not the Biden camp had been on it all along. In that environment, there's really a disinclination to take what they're saying. and the timeline of what they say happened at face value. And you just have to wonder if these people who gave up a year plus of their lives to work
on the Biden campaign or support Democratic campaigns, aren't willing to take Joe Biden's word on this, on his health, who in America is going to? These are the people who have been some of the most loyal to him, and they're having these questions.
You're suggesting, Lisa, that there are people who worked on the 2024 campaign who are wondering when did he learn he had cancer and was it earlier than perhaps he said. We should say we have no evidence that he learned this any earlier than just a couple.
Yeah, that's exactly right. So do the three of you think that Biden having this diagnosis now makes it harder, perhaps even impossible, for the party, which is having all these trust issues and was in the middle of re-examining it very openly, to continue to have that candid or increasingly candid conversation about what happened here and what went wrong and how to make sure it never happens again within the Democratic Party. You all heard David Axelrod.
the well-known advisor to Barack Obama, say on television a couple of mornings ago that he thinks Biden's diagnosis means that that larger debate should be set aside. for now. But should it, and will it. Well, it's important to know that Axelrod has been a Biden skeptic for a couple of years. I think when Axelrod said that on Sunday night, that statement wound up being operable for about 12 hours or so. And then when people woke up Monday morning, they were skeptical of...
the story being told by the Biden people. And so I think in the media era we're in now, And the trust level that Biden started with, he's just not afforded that kind of luxury to have people stop questioning the things that they were questioning Sunday before this diagnosis emerged.
Well, let's say that this debate doesn't get muted, doesn't get set aside, Reed is suggesting there's just not really a version of where that happens, and it continues, and maybe even intensifies. Where do you think it leads? And in what world does it lead to something really constructive? Look, I think the party is headed towards generational change. And I think that happens whether this debate happens over what was concealed and what was known.
and how long that debate continues, this is a party that recognizes it needs generational change. It's unclear whether all the more elderly members of the party who still hold seats in the Senate fully recognize that.
But certainly the base of the party is clamoring for that. Younger lawmakers are clamoring for that. And that is where this is going. How much time, what is expected to be a very crowded, very deep bench, Democrats who are eager to run for president in 2028, how much time they want to spend looking backwards, which is far less politically.
favorable for them than focusing on President Trump isn't really clear. I suspect that they'll mostly want to look forward to how they're going to change the party and particularly go after the current administration. But the Biden era, it's over. It's over. And how definitively it's over and what kind of treatment it gets remains unclear. But the party is moving into something new. The challenge, of course, is that right now everyone wants the debate.
still very much unfolding to be a debate about Biden. And on so many levels, that makes some sense. But clearly the entire party made a set of decisions. that led to him being the nominee until almost the end. And in some cases, those decisions were decisions to do nothing, even when polls showed very clearly that voters did not want Biden to run again. I believe, as you said, Lisa, earlier, a majority of Democrats Didn't think. He should do. And so whether generational change comes or not,
A question for the Democratic Party would seem to be, is it ready to listen to voters? Well, I think that's part of what is happening now in the party, right? We see... Democrats fanned out around the country. They're going to town halls. They're doing podcasts. Some of them are starting their own podcasts to try to listen to voters. Gavin Newsom. And there is just this broad reckoning in the party.
about what happened with Joe Biden, about what Donald Trump is doing as the president from the White House. and what kind of message and messenger is best to lead Democrats out of this wilderness that they're in. and be in a place where they can retake power. And the issue is at the moment, no one really has the right answer to that. And so we see people scrambling around. to test things out. And the one thing that they all seem to agree on is that they don't want anything to do with Joe Biden.
And kind of how that manifests itself going forward, we don't really know the answer to, except... that these people are all going to position themselves as different in some way from the last Democratic president. And one of the challenges, Michael, in doing so is that Joe Biden right now is dominating every conversation. And all of these things are making it so that Joe Biden is at the center of attention And as Democrats try to chart a new path away from Joe Biden, he's still center state.
Olha essa. Tyler, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Michael. Thanks so much, Michael. おでわいっぱい Here's what else On Monday, President Trump held a two-hour phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in his latest attempt to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. I talked to him about it. I said, when are we going to end this? Vladimir, I've known for a long time now. I said, when are we going to add this bloodshed, this bloodbath? It's a bloodbath.
But the call yielded no real breakthrough. Instead, Trump backed away from his previous demand that Russia agree to an immediate ceasefire and suggested that the United States may soon abandon the negotiations. which have made little progress since Trump's election. I've got big egos involved, I tell you. Big egos involved. But I think something's going to happen. And if it doesn't, I just back away and they're going to have to keep going.
And the Trump administration is criminally charging a sitting member of Congress, Democrat LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, for allegedly assaulting federal agents during a protest. The protest occurred earlier this month outside a New Jersey immigration detention center and featured a scuffle between lawmakers and police. But McIver insists she did nothing wrong and accused the White House of trying to criminalize what she called routine. oversight by members of Congress.
Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Olivia Natt. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Liz O'Balen. Contains original music by Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansfrock. I'm Michael Ballard. See you tomorrow.