April 20, 2025 • 35 mins
The 2024 presidential election was one of the most unprecedented and dramatic contests in American history. The election saw a sitting president drop his reelection bid, a former president survives felony convictions and an assassination attempt, and a vice president launch an unexpected 107-day campaign. Newt talks with bestselling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, about their new book, "FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House." They provide an in-depth look at the characters, motivations, and events of the election, based on interviews with over 150 insiders. Their conversation covers the surprising twists of the election, including Biden's debate performance, his eventual withdrawal, and the rise of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. They also discuss Trump's strategic decisions and his ability to connect with voters in unique ways.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of news World. The twenty twenty four
presidential election was an election the American people dreaded a
rematch between the two oldest men to ever serve as president.
But somewhere along the way, the Battle for the White
House became the most jaw dropping, heart pounding, head turning
contest in American history. The ride was so wild that
(00:27):
it forced a sitting president to drop his reelection. Bid
I once sent future president to survive felony convictions and
a would be assassin's bullet, and a vice president unexpectedly
thrown into the arena to mount an unprecedented one hundred
and seven day campaign to lead the free world. And
that's why I was very excited that. In their new
(00:48):
book Fight Inside, the Wildest Battle for the White House,
best selling authors Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes provide the
first graphic view of the characters, their motivations, and the
innermost thoughts as they battled to claim the ultimate prize
and define a political era. Based on real time interviews
with more than one hundred and fifty insiders from the Trump, Harris,
(01:11):
and Biden inner circles, as well as party leaders and operatives,
Fight delivers the vivid and stunning tale of an election
unlike any other. Here to discuss their book. I'm really
pleased to welcome my guests, Jonathan Allen, an award winning
political reporter at NBC News, and Amy Parnes, a senior
(01:31):
political correspondent covering national politics at The Hill. Welcome to
both of you.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, thank you, mister speaker. It's a pleasure to be
with you.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
First of A, I want to congratulate you as an
author myself. The fact that Fight is number two in
the New York Times Nonfiction bestseller list this week. It's
a great achievement for a book which I think, by
word of mouth, is just going to continue to sew.
I'm curious when did you two come up with the
concept of doing this book.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
This is our third campaign book, and we weren't even
going to do it until our publisher asked us on
the heels of Biden's disastrous debate last June, if we
would jump in, and so, of course we were pulled in,
and we knew that it was going to be an
incredible election cycle, but we could never have predicted the
twists and turns that this race would take.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
When you talked about that debate and you write that quote,
Biden altered the course of the twenty twenty four election
in a profound and prominent manner. Did the debate surprise you?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
It did, mister speaker. And here's the reason. It's not
that Amy or I thought that Joe Biden was that
Joe Biden of the vice presidency or his days in
the Senate. We wrote a book about the twenty twenty
election called Lucky that delved into the strange situation where
Biden was able to be hidden because of the pandemic,
basically hidden from the voters for most of that election.
(03:04):
We knew that he had even at that point, lost
something off his fastball, and I think we all saw
that there was decline. But still it is shocking, I'm
trying to think of a better word for it, but
just utterly shocking to see the leader of the free
world so bereft of coherent thought. I mean, there should
never be a minute period or five minute period where
(03:26):
the president of the United States is in the kind
of fog that Joe Biden was in that night, and
the way that we put it in the book, and
I you know, sources had put it to us, is
you can't unsee that. You can't see the person with
all the power to defend us with his finger on
the nuclear button just incapable of cogency. And so it
was shocking on that level. The degree to which and
(03:48):
the profundity of the decline I think was shocking.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Do you report that his total debate prep was one
forty five minute round? First, well, I'm not quite sure
why they wanted this early debate. You might be able
to shed some light on that. But if you're going
to do an early debate, is the incumbent it was
anyway you would block in a week to just totally focus,
and they get forty five minutes?
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Yeah, Well, I think, mister speaker, they wanted to change
the trajectory of the race. They needed a reset. They
were looking at their internal pulling and it was showing
that the former president was winning, and so I think
his team got together and thought that they needed to
do something to change the direction. And so they landed
(04:34):
on this debate, thinking that it would be a reset
of sorts, and little do they know, it would pull
them in the other direction and it would lead to
the president withdrawing from the race. They tried to do
various debate sessions with him, but he was in the
middle of a cold. We described this in great detail
in the book. But he had a sore throat and
(04:55):
he was coughing and sneezing, and they tried to work
with him. We asked, why wouldn't you cancel the debate,
and they thought that that would be even worse. It
would signal to people that, you know, he was weak
and couldn't be while he was sick, and so they
were in a no win situation.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Do you think in retrospect they would have been better
after cancel.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's a good question. I think if they thought they
could reschedule it quickly, then maybe it would have been
better to cancel. The truth is, maybe those were the
worst five minutes or ten minutes of Joe Biden's life.
But my guess is that they weren't. And at some
point the American public was either going to decide that
he was hiding too much or they were going to
see him like that. And if it had happened in
September or October, you know, they wouldn't have had an
(05:38):
opportunity to make a change. Obviously, President Trump wins despite
having had to beat both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I think what Harris provided the Democrats was somebody that
could rally around to minimize the number of defeats they
had in House and Senate races.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Do you think if Biden hedged in that he would
have lost by a bigger margin than Harris did?
Speaker 4 (06:04):
I think definitely. I mean, he seems to think that
he would have won. He has said as much, but
all evidence points to the fact that she probably performed
better than he would have.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
As you talked with people, what was the sense you
got that there wasn't more honest reporting about just how
deeply he had declined.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
I think it's an unfair criticism to be honest, mister speaker,
because I know I can speak for myself and John
in that we not only reported that his mental acuity
and his age in our respective news outlets, but we
also wrote about it in our previous book Lucky. We
always kind of knew about this, but we do have
new revelations in the book which shed new light on
(06:48):
how much President Biden was losing. As John says his fastball,
how he comes face to face with a Congressman, Eric Swalwell,
and at a congressional picnic at the White House, and
he doesn't recognize him. He needs to be cued by
Swallwell about who he is. This is a guy who
he competed against in twenty twenty and shared a debate
stage with.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And there are other moments.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
He needed fluorescent tape at a fundraiser's house to guide
him from place to place. That's more common in rallies
and bigger rallies, not as much in someone's home. A
teleprompter as well at someone's home, and we go on
and on. He needs a makeup artist when he travels.
That's sort of the first order of business that he
does when he's traveling. He meets with a makeup artist
(07:33):
ahead of meetings zoom meetings with his own staff. And
so there's revelation after revelation about all of this in
the book.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
And mister Speaker, I would just add to that. I
wouldn't make the argument that the media broadly covered itself
in glory with the coverage of Biden's decline, but there
are certain limitations. I mean, the White House was keeping
him in such a cocoon that even mid to high
level White House staffers didn't see him very often. When
you're in the media, if you're an objective journalist, you
(08:02):
can't go on television to write in a story that
the guy's got dementia or Alzheimer's, or try to diagnose
him as a doctor would. What you do is you
try to talk to the people that are close to
him and see what you can find out. Not surprisingly,
the White House officials tend to be pretty defensive of
the president. But as Amy said, I think both of
us did reporting on that decline, dating back to our
book Lucky and through the course of the last few years.
(08:25):
I think even we were shocked at the level that
we saw on the debate stage that one night, one
last thing. The American people aren't done. They could see
Biden's decline, even if it's not being reported as such,
even if nobody's got a diagnosis form, they could see
that decline, and they could see that the White House
was lying about it. And I think that's part of
the reason that Joe Biden was so unpopular by the
(08:47):
time he was out of the race, and I think
it's one of the reasons that swing voters didn't trust
the Democrats. By the time election day rolled around in November.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
The next phase shocked me. Trump went through getting shot,
the iconic moment of standing up, yelling, fight, fight, fight
with blood coming down, going to a very successful convention,
and everything is sort of set. You know that the
Trump people know they can beat Biden. And I remember
that Sunday morning after the convention, Biden just dropped out.
(09:32):
I don't know how much George Clooney was responsible, but
clearly between Speaker Pelosi and Barack Obama and others, there
was a sudden surge to get him out of the race. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I think what's interesting was your speaker is there's basically
a twenty four day period there, and there are Democrats
that are watching that debate that know that they need
to get rid of Joe Biden, and one of them
is Nancy Pelosi. But she also is very worried as
she's talking to donors and friends and you know, remember Congress.
Even that night, she's very worried, according to one of
(10:03):
our sources who spoke to her, that there will be
a bum rush to get rid of Biden and that
they will end up with Harris. And she does not
think that Kamala Harris is a very good candidate. She
also knows that the president can't be forced from the ticket.
That has to be his decision at some point, So
she knows that there's going to be pushed back from him.
If she pushes on him too hard, that he'll get
(10:25):
his back up against the wall and he'll be counter productive.
So you see her, over the course of twenty four
days try to manage a process to get him to
a place where he will get out. Other people try
to do that, they're not as strong. His donors freeze
the money. The money for their super pack got frozen,
and we go into all the sort of details of
these machinations in the book. We can talk about it
(10:46):
for about nine hours and not detail all the stuff
that's in the book. But I mean, I think the
basic core is not just smart Democrats, but I would
say most Democrats understood that Biden needed to leave. The
question was when you know how to get him to
make that decision on his own and who would replace him.
And two of the most powerful people in the party,
(11:06):
Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, thought that the best idea
was to have some sort of mini primary or open convention,
a mini primary leading to an open convention, which in
my humble opinion, would have been a complete blood bath
for the Democrats that would have ended up with Kamala
Harris as the nominee.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Anyway, it just struck me at the time that I
don't know to what extent she was inevitable, and to
what extent Biden saying she should be my successor made
it inevitable. You go from Joe Biden, the president is
the nominee, to Joe Biden is withdrawn and she's virtually inevitable.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, what's fascinating about that moment is gathered in her
poolhouse at the Naval Observatory in Washington, are her very
close aids and advisors, and they're all meeting, not knowing
that this announcement is coming the coming hours. They're meeting
to discuss what a switch might look like, and they
(12:05):
all think it might happen later in the week, but
they're surprised to learn when someone comes in and alerts
them of the fact and she has to get on
the phone with the President. It's quite startling to all
of them. And then that leads to her kind of
wanting She knows that every minute counts, and she really
needs to get everyone behind her, including her boss, President Biden,
(12:29):
and so she asks him on the call. She says,
are you sure you're going to drop out? And he
says yes, And she says, are you going to endorse me?
And he says, You've got my support, kid, which obviously
isn't a full endorsement, and she knows that, so she
pushes even more and says, look, I need your endorsement,
and so, long story short, he talks with his advisors
(12:49):
and they issue an endorsement, but he was going to
do it later in the week. So all of this
was happening, and she knows that she needs the support
because there are other Democrats who are considering maybe jumping
in the race, and they're worried about people like Governor Pritzker.
She knew she had to pounce and quickly.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Did you think he did that because he genuinely liked
her or he genuinely thought she was the natural follower
of his presidency.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I think he did it for a whole lot of reasons,
mister speaker, And you would know this better than I would.
But I think often when people make political decisions, they
think about their gut, they make the list of pros
and cons, and if everything lines up on the pro side,
they do the thing. And I think in this case
for him, there are a lot of things lining up
on the pro side, the first of which was if
he had picked somebody else or not endorsed her, it
(13:39):
would have looked like him admitting a mistake and having
picked her to be the vice president in the first place.
He tells the American people in twenty twenty, this is
the next best person to run the country should something
happen to me. And if he turned around and didn't
endorse her, I think it would have made him look
bad in that original choice. I think because she's a
black woman, and because the Democratic Party's sort of mores
(13:59):
are or what they are, I think that he liked
the idea that should she win, he would get some
plaudits for having paved the way in that direction, and
if he hadn't helped her, conversely, would have angered a
lot of people in his own base. Just to touch
on something Amy said a minute ago, it's just fascinating
for anybody that loves politics, and we really fleshed this
(14:20):
out in the book, is this moment of Joe Biden's
vanity really where he is saying to Kamala Harris on
the phone. And by the way, they had two phone calls.
It's only been reported before that they had won, but
in the book we have the second phone call too.
He's got this moment of vanity where he's saying to her,
(14:40):
I want you, but I want three or four days
to just sort of bask in the glory of my
own greatness at voluntarily giving up power like George Washington.
And we all heard him say that right, Like when
he gave his speech to the nation, he compared himself
to George Washington. By the way, he compared himself to
George Washington, to FDR to LBJ throughout his present and
seeing I think that we will all look back and
(15:02):
say that he was neither none of those leaders. He
was not Reagan, not Lincoln. But there's this moment of
vanity and he wants to be the center of attention still,
and Kamala Harris is like, I got to like whip
these votes. I got to get all these people lined up.
I got to do it before Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsomber, JB.
Pritzker gets out of the box, and I've gotten advantage,
(15:24):
but only if you endorse me quickly. And if you
don't endorse me quickly, we all devolved, and she finally
sort of makes that case, and he ends up doing
two statements about thirty minutes apart. That's as close as
she can get to getting ab toor endorser in the
first statement, is that he does his second one endorsing her.
And to just point an exclamation point on why this
mattered so much, we report that Jim Clyburn, a congressman
(15:46):
from South Carolina. I know you know him well, mister Speaker.
He was elected I think just before you became speaker.
Cliburne knows he has a phone call scheduled with Obama
that afternoon, and he wants to be able to get
out his own endorsement of Harris because he knows Obama
is calling to get him to support an open convention.
So even after the transfer, Obama is still trying to
(16:07):
make that happen.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
It does raise a question, sort of a what if
all the delegates had already been picked so you had
a finite universe. I mean, I do think the threat
of the Black Caucus to have repudiated her would have,
I think, irrevocably shattered the party for the foreseeable future.
So in that sense, she was almost the inevitable money.
(16:30):
But at the same time, you try to think about
anybody else trying to enter at that point, even if
Biden had not endorsed her, would have had an enormous
uphill problem. I don't quite see how even somebody with
Newsom's resources or Prisco's resources, how they could have done
it in a short time that was available.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
I agree with you, mister Speaker, and I think that's
one of the reasons none of them ended up trying,
is that it takes enormous resources. She was able to
inherit the Biden campaign treasury, which was a big thing
that others would not have been able to do, or
at least it would have been more complicated in terms
of election law. So I agree with you. I think
anybody else gets in, they have some sort of open convention.
(17:09):
They destroyed their party for many years in the fight
that happens, and she ends up with it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Anyway, we're at a point now he has endorsed her,
she is inevitable. I've often thought about the Trump people
that invested all the time and energy. They clearly thought
they had Biden in a position where they're going to
beat him, and all of a sudden that Sunday, their
world changes. I mean that had to be reasonably traumatic.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, I think it was very much traumatic, not least
for President Trump. Something that's lost at times, I guess
is sort of the degree to which his comeback is
like the most epic comeback in American political history.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Maybe you could argue Andrew Jackson from after he lost
in twenty four this is the most extraordinary personal achievement
of just grinding your way to power that I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
And he beats Joe Biden, he knocks him clean out
of the election. There's one more for anybody that plays
video games. It's like one more boss after you thought
you won the video.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
When I talked to him during that period, they were
actually pretty confident that they beat her. I think they
were a little rattled about how to shift gears and
that took him about a week. But underneath that they
thought they would shift gears, that she was definable, they
would be able to beat her, and they just had
to grind it out.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So I agree with you the people that we spoke
to also felt confident, but I would say a little
nervously confident, right, I mean there's that underlying We don't
know exactly how long her sugar high's going to last.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And it was disoriented. I mean, you suddenly had all
this new money coming in, all this new enthusiasm, and
you had, of course the propaganda media's all out effort
to build her up as though she was Joan of
Arc reincarnated. Maybe it would have been a close race
around Labert. There was sort of a peak moment of
pretending that she was really competent, and then gradually that
(19:06):
turned out that she lacked the cognitive excuse that Biden has.
But she wasn't actually much better at answering questions than Biden.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Was arguably worse, right, I mean, this was a change election.
The vast majority of Americans said the country was on
the wrong track. Biden offered nothing and change. He's out,
there's this opportunity for her to offer something that is
changed from what Biden's doing, and she lashes herself to him,
and he tells her as we were in the book
(19:34):
for the first time, he says to her, no daylight kid,
don't distance yourself. For me, there should be no daylight
between us. And she's hearing this as she comes in,
and you know, she owes him some loyalty put her
in this position in the first place, and she doesn't
have her own plan, and I think that becomes pretty apparent.
And so as a result, the Democrats are offering nothing
in the way of substantive change to the American people
(19:56):
in what was clearly a change election I mean elections
or change elections. But I don't remember a right track
wrong track that looked like the right track wrong track
of this election cycle. It could not have been screaming
more loudly at the Democrats.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The Jimmy Carter right track wrong track in eighty was comparable,
but not dramatically works. She's raising this astonishing amount of money.
It's hard to imagine you could raise that amount of
money and not somehow figure out a strategy for defining
Trump out of the race, I know.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
And you know what's interesting is that she had outraised
him and outspent him in the end, and even the
metrics were all in her favor too, you know, And
they kept pointing out us that they had more boots
on the ground, they had more people in the swinging states,
And what's interesting is it didn't matter because she wasn't
really connecting. Her message wasn't resonating with voters, and they
(20:51):
were all over the place in terms of message, and
I think that's why you're seeing the Democratic Party right
now kind of loss and not understanding what it is
they stand for.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
From that standpoint, I always felt that she was sort
of caught on a trap and that if she had
tried to distance herself from Biden, Biden would probably have
reacted very aggressively, and he did towards the end. I
always thought, towards the very end that he and Jill
decided it'll be pretty cool to be the only person
ever to beat Trump. But I just had this sense
(21:21):
that there are three or four things he did towards
the end that hurt her, and that they weren't because
he was stupid and old Jesus decided that she wasn't
going to be president, and that he was pretty happy
about that.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I don't think our reporting ever got to the level
of here's exactly what Joe Biden was thinking as he
sabotaged Kamala Harris. But to your point, you can literally
point to three or four things that he did. By
the way, the White House staff was telling the campaign
staff do whatever you have to do to win, and Biden,
one on one with Harris was telling her don't distance yourself.
(21:55):
So I think that's a number one sort of thing.
And to share other point, there's an implicit threat in
that he's still the sitting president. He still has the
bully pulp at the platform, and if she distances herself,
he has the ability to slam her for it, no
matter how directly or subtly or whatnot. He has the
ability to influence her future. And then you know, he
puts on a Maga hat at one of the rallies.
(22:17):
My son still thinks that Joe Biden endorsed Donald Trump
because he saw that video that didn't Biden endorse Trump.
And I'm like, no, Biden didn't endorse Trump. He makes
that remark about and I want to use quotation marks
here about Trump supporters being garbage while she's giving her
sort of her culmination speech, you know, at the foot
(22:39):
of the White House. So, yeah, he did some things.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
I wrote it at the time. If you hold a
big party with seventy five thousand people directly in front
of the White House, and you don't invite the president
first lady, they are likely to be very offended. What
did I miss?
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I think you're right, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
What was the Harrish team thinking?
Speaker 4 (23:00):
I think they wanted to publicly distance themselves from him.
They see the polls more than anyone. They knew how
unpopular he was in that moment, and yet they couldn't
quite do that because of what the President was telling Paris,
which was pleased no daylight between us, and so they
were walking a tightrope in how to handle that situation.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
One of the interesting things you get into that was
a little bit of a surprise, I think was the
emergence of JD. Vance as vice president. Trump really weighed
that for a pretty good length of time. It wasn't automatic.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, absolutely, I think that process played out the way.
Not every process that President Trump engages and plays out
in a sort of traditional way, but I think this
one kind of did in that I think Vance was
always the favorite, or at least had to lead over
the others, and the President in the end got back
to his guy or the guy that was leading the pack.
(24:14):
But he has this sort of beauty pageant, right or
the bachelorette or something where he's bringing vice presidential hopefuls
on stage with him and he's praising them and he's
talking about their chances openly. It's entertainment, and it keeps
the focus on Trump and that pick at times when
it might otherwise have been on Harris. We write about
the sort of last effort to lobby him on Trump
(24:35):
Force one as he's flying to the Republican Convention. I
think in the end, Vance represented where the mag of
movement is going. I think he has his finger on
the pulse of it better than anybody else. I think
Trump knew that Vance would be loyal to him as
vice president, and I think, or at least thought he
would be. And as we write, Trump doesn't actually think
(24:56):
vice president is the most important of his picks. He
thinks Secretary statement Attorney General are a little bit more important.
But I think Vance represented enough of the things that
he was looking for and nobody else did.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I have to go back, just for a second to Harris.
Do you think if the campaign had lasted longer she
would have done better or worse.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
She thinks that if the campaign went on longer she
would have won. And we report that in the books
she's told aids that she thinks the condensed timetable was
not in her favor. But that's interesting because a lot
of Democrats think that the shorter timetable did favor her.
She came into it, she had the convention, she had
the wind at her back, and then there was a
(25:38):
period where she didn't do any media and people had
this sense that she was trying to run out the clock,
and I think that hurt her, you know, and the
fact that she wasn't out there and let Trump sort
of build the narrative around him at the time. And
then there were these two ads, of course in the
final weeks of the campaign that I think were potent,
(25:58):
and one of them was the trans ad, which I
think was probably the best political ad in recent cycles.
And then another ad which talked about her appearance on
the View, where she essentially said that there was nothing
she would do that was different from the president. Both
of those things hurt her in big way.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
I thought that was the death knell. Frankly, they loved
the softest ball they could lob. She could have picked
anything and said, well, I probably do it. X differently,
but instead she goes, oh, no, I can't think of
the thing I do differently. Well, as you are pointing out,
if this is a change election, that's unbelievably self destructive
on her part. If you want to understand the scale
(26:36):
of Trump's genius and his capacity now to have started
in fifteen and still be there doing it, it was
the combination of giving out French fries at McDonald's and
then the garbage truck. If you're trying to appeal to
Middle America, eighty seven percent of the country goes to
McDonald's at least once a year. Eighty seven percent. Forty
(26:58):
million Americans have worked at McDonald's, including Jeff Bezos. And then,
of course you have the whole symbology with the garbage
truck and Trump walking into the convention hall wearing the
garbage outfit and saying it makes people, say it makes
them look thinner. Maybe I should wear it the rest
of the campaign. I mean, at that point, I don't
care how much money she raises. The earned media value
(27:19):
of those two events is incalculable.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
What seems to me, I absolutely agree with you. I mean,
Trump figured out in this election and we detail some
of it figured out in this election how to reach
voters who are not traditional voters and to basically create
a cultural affinity with a lot of them. And it's
more valuable than golden politics to have somebody like you
because they think you go to McDonald's with them, or
(27:43):
you're willing to get in a garbage truck, or you
get on one of the podcasts or one of the
YouTube shows that they listen to, not for the politics,
but because they like the comedian that's doing it, or
they like the guests that show up there, and they
suddenly start to think themselves, well, Donald Trump's not a politician,
He's a guy like me. You know, you could sit.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Down with Joe. Can you imagine Kamala trying to do
Joe Rogan for three hours?
Speaker 3 (28:06):
No, it would have been a disaster. I mean it
was a disaster that they set up a rally for
her in Houston on a Friday night in the fall
where football is the only thing going on, so that
she can be close to Joe Rogan's studio in case
they work out a deal and it falls through and
(28:27):
it's not a swing state, there's no reason to be
in Texas, and they bring in Beyonce, and Beyonce refuses
to sing, so they don't even get that. Just total debacle.
But what might have been a worst debacle would have
been actually going on for three hours with Joe Rogan.
As we saw in the ten seconds on the View,
she didn't have anything to say that would have differentiated
her from Biden on anything substantive. The one thing she
(28:50):
said in the one debate was different between the two
of them was background and experience. And that's not what
the public was looking for. It wasn't like we want
somebody with a different background running in the country. That's
the change we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Well, I was watching Trump at Ultimate Fighting Championship. He
currently has a net seventeen advantage among younger males in
terms of approved disapproved seventeen okay, which for a Republican
has probably not been true since Theodore Roosevelt. And what
hit me watching him was, first of all, I obviously
enjoys himself, but for an entire generation of younger males,
(29:25):
they could identify with what he was doing in a
way that nobody else in the country would. People at
Harvard don't watch Aultimate Fighting Championships, but that there's a
knack to what he does that is consistently marketing to
niches nobody else thinks of, and doing it in ways
that are not political, but have a consequence that's very political.
(29:47):
And I think that makes him very different from anybody
we've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
It's second nature to him. It's the branding genius of
Donald Trump. You know, you could put ten Pepsi executives
in a room and they would be half as good
as Trump is at branding himself, and it feels so natural.
I am certain that, like most people in politics, he
spends some of his time in the shower at night,
thinking like, what's the catch phrase I want out there?
(30:13):
But whenever it comes out, it just sounds like everything else.
So to your point, I think he just kind of
subliminally is branding all the time to various people.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Well, I think he sleeps four hours a day, and
I think for all twenty hours he's thinking about the
next game. The next phrase. Is just an endless process
in his book. Let me ask you to one last question.
I really appreciate you taking this time, and I'm delighted
that your publisher talked to you into doing this book,
which is pretty remarkable to put it together literally in
(30:44):
real time as things were actually happening. But what's the
biggest single surprise to you looking at the whole experience.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
I'll tell you. I think the biggest single surprise is
the degree to which President Trump learns at his age
most people aren't still actively learning. And you see I
think between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, a real
understanding of what his limitations were on twenty twenty, how
he hurt himself in the twenty twenty election in different ways,
(31:14):
and what he needed to do to keep this campaign
on track, including but not limited to hiring Susie Wiles
to run the show. I think she did a great
job with that. I think his position on a national
abortion ban, where he basically didn't endorse it, his staff
came to him and said, look, a lot of these
swing states have more liberal abortion laws, and if you
(31:34):
do a national abortion band, you're going to energize the
folks that are for abortion rights. You're going to energize
them against you. But if you don't support the thing,
you take that issue off the table in those states.
They convinced him to get behind early voting, which he
obviously doesn't believe in you know, he's going to try
to get rid of that now, but they convinced him.
In order to compete, you got to do this. So
(31:55):
you go through this and you're like, here is a
candidate who has truly evolved from twenty twenty in terms
of focusing himself, disciplining himself on the campaign trail, listening
to the right people, crowding out some of the wrong voices.
To me, watching all of that happen, and getting sort
of an inside book, which I think you do in
this book. Was it was surprising because it's surprising any
(32:16):
time a fully grown adult actually develops and learns. I mean,
I'm almost fifty and it's hard for me to learn
and change my ways.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
There were so many but I think the human aspect.
We detail this scene in the book with Susie Wiles
talking to a communications aide Danielle Alvarez. I'm in a
kitchenette as the Trump criminal trial is happening in New York,
and it's a very human moment because she tears up,
she chokes up and says, I have a feeling if
they're not going to get him this way, they're going
(32:46):
to try to kill him, and I think that's a really,
really powerful moment, and it shows just how much all
of these people went through in the last cycle at least,
and so I think that is one big revelation. But
also when you look at the train wreck on the
Democratic side, you see that Kamala Harris enters election night
(33:08):
thinking that she's going to win, And I think that
was one of the biggest bombshells in the book too,
because she is gas lit by her own campaign. So
I think you learn something new on every page of
this book. But there are so many key moments that
explain so much.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Listen, I want to thank both of you for joining me.
I think the speed with what you did this book,
the number of unique insights you have in it. Fight
Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House really is
a wild book about a wild battle that's available now
on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. It's a great read.
I recommend everybody wants to understand American politics and government
(33:46):
how to get a copy of it, and we're certainly
going to link to it on our show page. But
I want to thank the two of you given everything
you're doing, and your status is once again best selling authors.
I really appreciate you taking time with us.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Thank you, mister Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Thank you to my guests Jonathan Allen and Amy Parns.
You can get a link to buy their new book
Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced
by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarnesie Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(34:26):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld
can sign up for my three free weekly columns at
Ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(34:49):
is neut World.
On this episode of news World. The twenty twenty four
presidential election was an election the American people dreaded a
rematch between the two oldest men to ever serve as president.
But somewhere along the way, the Battle for the White
House became the most jaw dropping, heart pounding, head turning
contest in American history. The ride was so wild that
(00:27):
it forced a sitting president to drop his reelection. Bid
I once sent future president to survive felony convictions and
a would be assassin's bullet, and a vice president unexpectedly
thrown into the arena to mount an unprecedented one hundred
and seven day campaign to lead the free world. And
that's why I was very excited that. In their new
(00:48):
book Fight Inside, the Wildest Battle for the White House,
best selling authors Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes provide the
first graphic view of the characters, their motivations, and the
innermost thoughts as they battled to claim the ultimate prize
and define a political era. Based on real time interviews
with more than one hundred and fifty insiders from the Trump, Harris,
(01:11):
and Biden inner circles, as well as party leaders and operatives,
Fight delivers the vivid and stunning tale of an election
unlike any other. Here to discuss their book. I'm really
pleased to welcome my guests, Jonathan Allen, an award winning
political reporter at NBC News, and Amy Parnes, a senior
(01:31):
political correspondent covering national politics at The Hill. Welcome to
both of you.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Yeah, thank you, mister speaker. It's a pleasure to be
with you.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
First of A, I want to congratulate you as an
author myself. The fact that Fight is number two in
the New York Times Nonfiction bestseller list this week. It's
a great achievement for a book which I think, by
word of mouth, is just going to continue to sew.
I'm curious when did you two come up with the
concept of doing this book.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
This is our third campaign book, and we weren't even
going to do it until our publisher asked us on
the heels of Biden's disastrous debate last June, if we
would jump in, and so, of course we were pulled in,
and we knew that it was going to be an
incredible election cycle, but we could never have predicted the
twists and turns that this race would take.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
When you talked about that debate and you write that quote,
Biden altered the course of the twenty twenty four election
in a profound and prominent manner. Did the debate surprise you?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
It did, mister speaker. And here's the reason. It's not
that Amy or I thought that Joe Biden was that
Joe Biden of the vice presidency or his days in
the Senate. We wrote a book about the twenty twenty
election called Lucky that delved into the strange situation where
Biden was able to be hidden because of the pandemic,
basically hidden from the voters for most of that election.
(03:04):
We knew that he had even at that point, lost
something off his fastball, and I think we all saw
that there was decline. But still it is shocking, I'm
trying to think of a better word for it, but
just utterly shocking to see the leader of the free
world so bereft of coherent thought. I mean, there should
never be a minute period or five minute period where
(03:26):
the president of the United States is in the kind
of fog that Joe Biden was in that night, and
the way that we put it in the book, and
I you know, sources had put it to us, is
you can't unsee that. You can't see the person with
all the power to defend us with his finger on
the nuclear button just incapable of cogency. And so it
was shocking on that level. The degree to which and
(03:48):
the profundity of the decline I think was shocking.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Do you report that his total debate prep was one
forty five minute round? First, well, I'm not quite sure
why they wanted this early debate. You might be able
to shed some light on that. But if you're going
to do an early debate, is the incumbent it was
anyway you would block in a week to just totally focus,
and they get forty five minutes?
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Yeah, Well, I think, mister speaker, they wanted to change
the trajectory of the race. They needed a reset. They
were looking at their internal pulling and it was showing
that the former president was winning, and so I think
his team got together and thought that they needed to
do something to change the direction. And so they landed
(04:34):
on this debate, thinking that it would be a reset
of sorts, and little do they know, it would pull
them in the other direction and it would lead to
the president withdrawing from the race. They tried to do
various debate sessions with him, but he was in the
middle of a cold. We described this in great detail
in the book. But he had a sore throat and
(04:55):
he was coughing and sneezing, and they tried to work
with him. We asked, why wouldn't you cancel the debate,
and they thought that that would be even worse. It
would signal to people that, you know, he was weak
and couldn't be while he was sick, and so they
were in a no win situation.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Do you think in retrospect they would have been better
after cancel.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
That's a good question. I think if they thought they
could reschedule it quickly, then maybe it would have been
better to cancel. The truth is, maybe those were the
worst five minutes or ten minutes of Joe Biden's life.
But my guess is that they weren't. And at some
point the American public was either going to decide that
he was hiding too much or they were going to
see him like that. And if it had happened in
September or October, you know, they wouldn't have had an
(05:38):
opportunity to make a change. Obviously, President Trump wins despite
having had to beat both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I think what Harris provided the Democrats was somebody that
could rally around to minimize the number of defeats they
had in House and Senate races.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Do you think if Biden hedged in that he would
have lost by a bigger margin than Harris did?
Speaker 4 (06:04):
I think definitely. I mean, he seems to think that
he would have won. He has said as much, but
all evidence points to the fact that she probably performed
better than he would have.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
As you talked with people, what was the sense you
got that there wasn't more honest reporting about just how
deeply he had declined.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
I think it's an unfair criticism to be honest, mister speaker,
because I know I can speak for myself and John
in that we not only reported that his mental acuity
and his age in our respective news outlets, but we
also wrote about it in our previous book Lucky. We
always kind of knew about this, but we do have
new revelations in the book which shed new light on
(06:48):
how much President Biden was losing. As John says his fastball,
how he comes face to face with a Congressman, Eric Swalwell,
and at a congressional picnic at the White House, and
he doesn't recognize him. He needs to be cued by
Swallwell about who he is. This is a guy who
he competed against in twenty twenty and shared a debate
stage with.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And there are other moments.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
He needed fluorescent tape at a fundraiser's house to guide
him from place to place. That's more common in rallies
and bigger rallies, not as much in someone's home. A
teleprompter as well at someone's home, and we go on
and on. He needs a makeup artist when he travels.
That's sort of the first order of business that he
does when he's traveling. He meets with a makeup artist
(07:33):
ahead of meetings zoom meetings with his own staff. And
so there's revelation after revelation about all of this in
the book.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
And mister Speaker, I would just add to that. I
wouldn't make the argument that the media broadly covered itself
in glory with the coverage of Biden's decline, but there
are certain limitations. I mean, the White House was keeping
him in such a cocoon that even mid to high
level White House staffers didn't see him very often. When
you're in the media, if you're an objective journalist, you
(08:02):
can't go on television to write in a story that
the guy's got dementia or Alzheimer's, or try to diagnose
him as a doctor would. What you do is you
try to talk to the people that are close to
him and see what you can find out. Not surprisingly,
the White House officials tend to be pretty defensive of
the president. But as Amy said, I think both of
us did reporting on that decline, dating back to our
book Lucky and through the course of the last few years.
(08:25):
I think even we were shocked at the level that
we saw on the debate stage that one night, one
last thing. The American people aren't done. They could see
Biden's decline, even if it's not being reported as such,
even if nobody's got a diagnosis form, they could see
that decline, and they could see that the White House
was lying about it. And I think that's part of
the reason that Joe Biden was so unpopular by the
(08:47):
time he was out of the race, and I think
it's one of the reasons that swing voters didn't trust
the Democrats. By the time election day rolled around in November.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
The next phase shocked me. Trump went through getting shot,
the iconic moment of standing up, yelling, fight, fight, fight
with blood coming down, going to a very successful convention,
and everything is sort of set. You know that the
Trump people know they can beat Biden. And I remember
that Sunday morning after the convention, Biden just dropped out.
(09:32):
I don't know how much George Clooney was responsible, but
clearly between Speaker Pelosi and Barack Obama and others, there
was a sudden surge to get him out of the race. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I think what's interesting was your speaker is there's basically
a twenty four day period there, and there are Democrats
that are watching that debate that know that they need
to get rid of Joe Biden, and one of them
is Nancy Pelosi. But she also is very worried as
she's talking to donors and friends and you know, remember Congress.
Even that night, she's very worried, according to one of
(10:03):
our sources who spoke to her, that there will be
a bum rush to get rid of Biden and that
they will end up with Harris. And she does not
think that Kamala Harris is a very good candidate. She
also knows that the president can't be forced from the ticket.
That has to be his decision at some point, So
she knows that there's going to be pushed back from him.
If she pushes on him too hard, that he'll get
(10:25):
his back up against the wall and he'll be counter productive.
So you see her, over the course of twenty four
days try to manage a process to get him to
a place where he will get out. Other people try
to do that, they're not as strong. His donors freeze
the money. The money for their super pack got frozen,
and we go into all the sort of details of
these machinations in the book. We can talk about it
(10:46):
for about nine hours and not detail all the stuff
that's in the book. But I mean, I think the
basic core is not just smart Democrats, but I would
say most Democrats understood that Biden needed to leave. The
question was when you know how to get him to
make that decision on his own and who would replace him.
And two of the most powerful people in the party,
(11:06):
Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, thought that the best idea
was to have some sort of mini primary or open convention,
a mini primary leading to an open convention, which in
my humble opinion, would have been a complete blood bath
for the Democrats that would have ended up with Kamala
Harris as the nominee.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Anyway, it just struck me at the time that I
don't know to what extent she was inevitable, and to
what extent Biden saying she should be my successor made
it inevitable. You go from Joe Biden, the president is
the nominee, to Joe Biden is withdrawn and she's virtually inevitable.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, what's fascinating about that moment is gathered in her
poolhouse at the Naval Observatory in Washington, are her very
close aids and advisors, and they're all meeting, not knowing
that this announcement is coming the coming hours. They're meeting
to discuss what a switch might look like, and they
(12:05):
all think it might happen later in the week, but
they're surprised to learn when someone comes in and alerts
them of the fact and she has to get on
the phone with the President. It's quite startling to all
of them. And then that leads to her kind of
wanting She knows that every minute counts, and she really
needs to get everyone behind her, including her boss, President Biden,
(12:29):
and so she asks him on the call. She says,
are you sure you're going to drop out? And he
says yes, And she says, are you going to endorse me?
And he says, You've got my support, kid, which obviously
isn't a full endorsement, and she knows that, so she
pushes even more and says, look, I need your endorsement,
and so, long story short, he talks with his advisors
(12:49):
and they issue an endorsement, but he was going to
do it later in the week. So all of this
was happening, and she knows that she needs the support
because there are other Democrats who are considering maybe jumping
in the race, and they're worried about people like Governor Pritzker.
She knew she had to pounce and quickly.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Did you think he did that because he genuinely liked
her or he genuinely thought she was the natural follower
of his presidency.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
I think he did it for a whole lot of reasons,
mister speaker, And you would know this better than I would.
But I think often when people make political decisions, they
think about their gut, they make the list of pros
and cons, and if everything lines up on the pro side,
they do the thing. And I think in this case
for him, there are a lot of things lining up
on the pro side, the first of which was if
he had picked somebody else or not endorsed her, it
(13:39):
would have looked like him admitting a mistake and having
picked her to be the vice president in the first place.
He tells the American people in twenty twenty, this is
the next best person to run the country should something
happen to me. And if he turned around and didn't
endorse her, I think it would have made him look
bad in that original choice. I think because she's a
black woman, and because the Democratic Party's sort of mores
(13:59):
are or what they are, I think that he liked
the idea that should she win, he would get some
plaudits for having paved the way in that direction, and
if he hadn't helped her, conversely, would have angered a
lot of people in his own base. Just to touch
on something Amy said a minute ago, it's just fascinating
for anybody that loves politics, and we really fleshed this
(14:20):
out in the book, is this moment of Joe Biden's
vanity really where he is saying to Kamala Harris on
the phone. And by the way, they had two phone calls.
It's only been reported before that they had won, but
in the book we have the second phone call too.
He's got this moment of vanity where he's saying to her,
(14:40):
I want you, but I want three or four days
to just sort of bask in the glory of my
own greatness at voluntarily giving up power like George Washington.
And we all heard him say that right, Like when
he gave his speech to the nation, he compared himself
to George Washington. By the way, he compared himself to
George Washington, to FDR to LBJ throughout his present and
seeing I think that we will all look back and
(15:02):
say that he was neither none of those leaders. He
was not Reagan, not Lincoln. But there's this moment of
vanity and he wants to be the center of attention still,
and Kamala Harris is like, I got to like whip
these votes. I got to get all these people lined up.
I got to do it before Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsomber, JB.
Pritzker gets out of the box, and I've gotten advantage,
(15:24):
but only if you endorse me quickly. And if you
don't endorse me quickly, we all devolved, and she finally
sort of makes that case, and he ends up doing
two statements about thirty minutes apart. That's as close as
she can get to getting ab toor endorser in the
first statement, is that he does his second one endorsing her.
And to just point an exclamation point on why this
mattered so much, we report that Jim Clyburn, a congressman
(15:46):
from South Carolina. I know you know him well, mister Speaker.
He was elected I think just before you became speaker.
Cliburne knows he has a phone call scheduled with Obama
that afternoon, and he wants to be able to get
out his own endorsement of Harris because he knows Obama
is calling to get him to support an open convention.
So even after the transfer, Obama is still trying to
(16:07):
make that happen.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
It does raise a question, sort of a what if
all the delegates had already been picked so you had
a finite universe. I mean, I do think the threat
of the Black Caucus to have repudiated her would have,
I think, irrevocably shattered the party for the foreseeable future.
So in that sense, she was almost the inevitable money.
(16:30):
But at the same time, you try to think about
anybody else trying to enter at that point, even if
Biden had not endorsed her, would have had an enormous
uphill problem. I don't quite see how even somebody with
Newsom's resources or Prisco's resources, how they could have done
it in a short time that was available.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
I agree with you, mister Speaker, and I think that's
one of the reasons none of them ended up trying,
is that it takes enormous resources. She was able to
inherit the Biden campaign treasury, which was a big thing
that others would not have been able to do, or
at least it would have been more complicated in terms
of election law. So I agree with you. I think
anybody else gets in, they have some sort of open convention.
(17:09):
They destroyed their party for many years in the fight
that happens, and she ends up with it.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Anyway, we're at a point now he has endorsed her,
she is inevitable. I've often thought about the Trump people
that invested all the time and energy. They clearly thought
they had Biden in a position where they're going to
beat him, and all of a sudden that Sunday, their
world changes. I mean that had to be reasonably traumatic.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, I think it was very much traumatic, not least
for President Trump. Something that's lost at times, I guess
is sort of the degree to which his comeback is
like the most epic comeback in American political history.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Maybe you could argue Andrew Jackson from after he lost
in twenty four this is the most extraordinary personal achievement
of just grinding your way to power that I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
And he beats Joe Biden, he knocks him clean out
of the election. There's one more for anybody that plays
video games. It's like one more boss after you thought
you won the video.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
When I talked to him during that period, they were
actually pretty confident that they beat her. I think they
were a little rattled about how to shift gears and
that took him about a week. But underneath that they
thought they would shift gears, that she was definable, they
would be able to beat her, and they just had
to grind it out.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
So I agree with you the people that we spoke
to also felt confident, but I would say a little
nervously confident, right, I mean there's that underlying We don't
know exactly how long her sugar high's going to last.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And it was disoriented. I mean, you suddenly had all
this new money coming in, all this new enthusiasm, and
you had, of course the propaganda media's all out effort
to build her up as though she was Joan of
Arc reincarnated. Maybe it would have been a close race
around Labert. There was sort of a peak moment of
pretending that she was really competent, and then gradually that
(19:06):
turned out that she lacked the cognitive excuse that Biden has.
But she wasn't actually much better at answering questions than Biden.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Was arguably worse, right, I mean, this was a change election.
The vast majority of Americans said the country was on
the wrong track. Biden offered nothing and change. He's out,
there's this opportunity for her to offer something that is
changed from what Biden's doing, and she lashes herself to him,
and he tells her as we were in the book
(19:34):
for the first time, he says to her, no daylight kid,
don't distance yourself. For me, there should be no daylight
between us. And she's hearing this as she comes in,
and you know, she owes him some loyalty put her
in this position in the first place, and she doesn't
have her own plan, and I think that becomes pretty apparent.
And so as a result, the Democrats are offering nothing
in the way of substantive change to the American people
(19:56):
in what was clearly a change election I mean elections
or change elections. But I don't remember a right track
wrong track that looked like the right track wrong track
of this election cycle. It could not have been screaming
more loudly at the Democrats.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The Jimmy Carter right track wrong track in eighty was comparable,
but not dramatically works. She's raising this astonishing amount of money.
It's hard to imagine you could raise that amount of
money and not somehow figure out a strategy for defining
Trump out of the race, I know.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
And you know what's interesting is that she had outraised
him and outspent him in the end, and even the
metrics were all in her favor too, you know, And
they kept pointing out us that they had more boots
on the ground, they had more people in the swinging states,
And what's interesting is it didn't matter because she wasn't
really connecting. Her message wasn't resonating with voters, and they
(20:51):
were all over the place in terms of message, and
I think that's why you're seeing the Democratic Party right
now kind of loss and not understanding what it is
they stand for.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
From that standpoint, I always felt that she was sort
of caught on a trap and that if she had
tried to distance herself from Biden, Biden would probably have
reacted very aggressively, and he did towards the end. I
always thought, towards the very end that he and Jill
decided it'll be pretty cool to be the only person
ever to beat Trump. But I just had this sense
(21:21):
that there are three or four things he did towards
the end that hurt her, and that they weren't because
he was stupid and old Jesus decided that she wasn't
going to be president, and that he was pretty happy
about that.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I don't think our reporting ever got to the level
of here's exactly what Joe Biden was thinking as he
sabotaged Kamala Harris. But to your point, you can literally
point to three or four things that he did. By
the way, the White House staff was telling the campaign
staff do whatever you have to do to win, and Biden,
one on one with Harris was telling her don't distance yourself.
(21:55):
So I think that's a number one sort of thing.
And to share other point, there's an implicit threat in
that he's still the sitting president. He still has the
bully pulp at the platform, and if she distances herself,
he has the ability to slam her for it, no
matter how directly or subtly or whatnot. He has the
ability to influence her future. And then you know, he
puts on a Maga hat at one of the rallies.
(22:17):
My son still thinks that Joe Biden endorsed Donald Trump
because he saw that video that didn't Biden endorse Trump.
And I'm like, no, Biden didn't endorse Trump. He makes
that remark about and I want to use quotation marks
here about Trump supporters being garbage while she's giving her
sort of her culmination speech, you know, at the foot
(22:39):
of the White House. So, yeah, he did some things.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
I wrote it at the time. If you hold a
big party with seventy five thousand people directly in front
of the White House, and you don't invite the president
first lady, they are likely to be very offended. What
did I miss?
Speaker 3 (22:56):
I think you're right, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
What was the Harrish team thinking?
Speaker 4 (23:00):
I think they wanted to publicly distance themselves from him.
They see the polls more than anyone. They knew how
unpopular he was in that moment, and yet they couldn't
quite do that because of what the President was telling Paris,
which was pleased no daylight between us, and so they
were walking a tightrope in how to handle that situation.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
One of the interesting things you get into that was
a little bit of a surprise, I think was the
emergence of JD. Vance as vice president. Trump really weighed
that for a pretty good length of time. It wasn't automatic.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Yeah, absolutely, I think that process played out the way.
Not every process that President Trump engages and plays out
in a sort of traditional way, but I think this
one kind of did in that I think Vance was
always the favorite, or at least had to lead over
the others, and the President in the end got back
to his guy or the guy that was leading the pack.
(24:14):
But he has this sort of beauty pageant, right or
the bachelorette or something where he's bringing vice presidential hopefuls
on stage with him and he's praising them and he's
talking about their chances openly. It's entertainment, and it keeps
the focus on Trump and that pick at times when
it might otherwise have been on Harris. We write about
the sort of last effort to lobby him on Trump
(24:35):
Force one as he's flying to the Republican Convention. I
think in the end, Vance represented where the mag of
movement is going. I think he has his finger on
the pulse of it better than anybody else. I think
Trump knew that Vance would be loyal to him as
vice president, and I think, or at least thought he
would be. And as we write, Trump doesn't actually think
(24:56):
vice president is the most important of his picks. He
thinks Secretary statement Attorney General are a little bit more important.
But I think Vance represented enough of the things that
he was looking for and nobody else did.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I have to go back, just for a second to Harris.
Do you think if the campaign had lasted longer she
would have done better or worse.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
She thinks that if the campaign went on longer she
would have won. And we report that in the books
she's told aids that she thinks the condensed timetable was
not in her favor. But that's interesting because a lot
of Democrats think that the shorter timetable did favor her.
She came into it, she had the convention, she had
the wind at her back, and then there was a
(25:38):
period where she didn't do any media and people had
this sense that she was trying to run out the clock,
and I think that hurt her, you know, and the
fact that she wasn't out there and let Trump sort
of build the narrative around him at the time. And
then there were these two ads, of course in the
final weeks of the campaign that I think were potent,
(25:58):
and one of them was the trans ad, which I
think was probably the best political ad in recent cycles.
And then another ad which talked about her appearance on
the View, where she essentially said that there was nothing
she would do that was different from the president. Both
of those things hurt her in big way.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
I thought that was the death knell. Frankly, they loved
the softest ball they could lob. She could have picked
anything and said, well, I probably do it. X differently,
but instead she goes, oh, no, I can't think of
the thing I do differently. Well, as you are pointing out,
if this is a change election, that's unbelievably self destructive
on her part. If you want to understand the scale
(26:36):
of Trump's genius and his capacity now to have started
in fifteen and still be there doing it, it was
the combination of giving out French fries at McDonald's and
then the garbage truck. If you're trying to appeal to
Middle America, eighty seven percent of the country goes to
McDonald's at least once a year. Eighty seven percent. Forty
(26:58):
million Americans have worked at McDonald's, including Jeff Bezos. And then,
of course you have the whole symbology with the garbage
truck and Trump walking into the convention hall wearing the
garbage outfit and saying it makes people, say it makes
them look thinner. Maybe I should wear it the rest
of the campaign. I mean, at that point, I don't
care how much money she raises. The earned media value
(27:19):
of those two events is incalculable.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
What seems to me, I absolutely agree with you. I mean,
Trump figured out in this election and we detail some
of it figured out in this election how to reach
voters who are not traditional voters and to basically create
a cultural affinity with a lot of them. And it's
more valuable than golden politics to have somebody like you
because they think you go to McDonald's with them, or
(27:43):
you're willing to get in a garbage truck, or you
get on one of the podcasts or one of the
YouTube shows that they listen to, not for the politics,
but because they like the comedian that's doing it, or
they like the guests that show up there, and they
suddenly start to think themselves, well, Donald Trump's not a politician,
He's a guy like me. You know, you could sit.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Down with Joe. Can you imagine Kamala trying to do
Joe Rogan for three hours?
Speaker 3 (28:06):
No, it would have been a disaster. I mean it
was a disaster that they set up a rally for
her in Houston on a Friday night in the fall
where football is the only thing going on, so that
she can be close to Joe Rogan's studio in case
they work out a deal and it falls through and
(28:27):
it's not a swing state, there's no reason to be
in Texas, and they bring in Beyonce, and Beyonce refuses
to sing, so they don't even get that. Just total debacle.
But what might have been a worst debacle would have
been actually going on for three hours with Joe Rogan.
As we saw in the ten seconds on the View,
she didn't have anything to say that would have differentiated
her from Biden on anything substantive. The one thing she
(28:50):
said in the one debate was different between the two
of them was background and experience. And that's not what
the public was looking for. It wasn't like we want
somebody with a different background running in the country. That's
the change we're looking for.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
Well, I was watching Trump at Ultimate Fighting Championship. He
currently has a net seventeen advantage among younger males in
terms of approved disapproved seventeen okay, which for a Republican
has probably not been true since Theodore Roosevelt. And what
hit me watching him was, first of all, I obviously
enjoys himself, but for an entire generation of younger males,
(29:25):
they could identify with what he was doing in a
way that nobody else in the country would. People at
Harvard don't watch Aultimate Fighting Championships, but that there's a
knack to what he does that is consistently marketing to
niches nobody else thinks of, and doing it in ways
that are not political, but have a consequence that's very political.
(29:47):
And I think that makes him very different from anybody
we've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
It's second nature to him. It's the branding genius of
Donald Trump. You know, you could put ten Pepsi executives
in a room and they would be half as good
as Trump is at branding himself, and it feels so natural.
I am certain that, like most people in politics, he
spends some of his time in the shower at night,
thinking like, what's the catch phrase I want out there?
(30:13):
But whenever it comes out, it just sounds like everything else.
So to your point, I think he just kind of
subliminally is branding all the time to various people.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Well, I think he sleeps four hours a day, and
I think for all twenty hours he's thinking about the
next game. The next phrase. Is just an endless process
in his book. Let me ask you to one last question.
I really appreciate you taking this time, and I'm delighted
that your publisher talked to you into doing this book,
which is pretty remarkable to put it together literally in
(30:44):
real time as things were actually happening. But what's the
biggest single surprise to you looking at the whole experience.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
I'll tell you. I think the biggest single surprise is
the degree to which President Trump learns at his age
most people aren't still actively learning. And you see I
think between twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, a real
understanding of what his limitations were on twenty twenty, how
he hurt himself in the twenty twenty election in different ways,
(31:14):
and what he needed to do to keep this campaign
on track, including but not limited to hiring Susie Wiles
to run the show. I think she did a great
job with that. I think his position on a national
abortion ban, where he basically didn't endorse it, his staff
came to him and said, look, a lot of these
swing states have more liberal abortion laws, and if you
(31:34):
do a national abortion band, you're going to energize the
folks that are for abortion rights. You're going to energize
them against you. But if you don't support the thing,
you take that issue off the table in those states.
They convinced him to get behind early voting, which he
obviously doesn't believe in you know, he's going to try
to get rid of that now, but they convinced him.
In order to compete, you got to do this. So
(31:55):
you go through this and you're like, here is a
candidate who has truly evolved from twenty twenty in terms
of focusing himself, disciplining himself on the campaign trail, listening
to the right people, crowding out some of the wrong voices.
To me, watching all of that happen, and getting sort
of an inside book, which I think you do in
this book. Was it was surprising because it's surprising any
(32:16):
time a fully grown adult actually develops and learns. I mean,
I'm almost fifty and it's hard for me to learn
and change my ways.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
There were so many but I think the human aspect.
We detail this scene in the book with Susie Wiles
talking to a communications aide Danielle Alvarez. I'm in a
kitchenette as the Trump criminal trial is happening in New York,
and it's a very human moment because she tears up,
she chokes up and says, I have a feeling if
they're not going to get him this way, they're going
(32:46):
to try to kill him, and I think that's a really,
really powerful moment, and it shows just how much all
of these people went through in the last cycle at least,
and so I think that is one big revelation. But
also when you look at the train wreck on the
Democratic side, you see that Kamala Harris enters election night
(33:08):
thinking that she's going to win, And I think that
was one of the biggest bombshells in the book too,
because she is gas lit by her own campaign. So
I think you learn something new on every page of
this book. But there are so many key moments that
explain so much.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Listen, I want to thank both of you for joining me.
I think the speed with what you did this book,
the number of unique insights you have in it. Fight
Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House really is
a wild book about a wild battle that's available now
on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. It's a great read.
I recommend everybody wants to understand American politics and government
(33:46):
how to get a copy of it, and we're certainly
going to link to it on our show page. But
I want to thank the two of you given everything
you're doing, and your status is once again best selling authors.
I really appreciate you taking time with us.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Thank you, mister Thank you so much, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Thank you to my guests Jonathan Allen and Amy Parns.
You can get a link to buy their new book
Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House on
our show page at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced
by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producers Guarnesie Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(34:26):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingrishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld
can sign up for my three free weekly columns at
Ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
(34:49):
is neut World.
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