← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes: "Fight" and the Price of Gaslighting
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- [00:00]
Charlie Sykes
Foreign. I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. We're recording this in the midst of a growing trade war. Imagine this global game of chicken that is leading to higher and higher tariffs and the prospect of the possibility of both inflation and a recession at the same time. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is assuring the world, I got this. Just, you know, keep cool because I have a plan. So I'm really interested in bouncing this off of our guest today. The authors of this is like the first big bestseller of the 2024 campaign, right? This is Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes. By the way, congratulations on the book, both of you. First of all, welcome to the podcast. Jonathan Nami.
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Amy Parnes
Thank you.
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Jonathan Allen
We're excited to be joining you. Charlie, on this day, you said best selling. It just hit number two on Amazon for its debut week and we were competing with like Easter Bunny books and a Mel Robbins self help book. So, like hitting number two overall on Amazon is, is pretty, it's pretty heavy stuff. Like, super excited to be talking with you on the day that that happened.
- [01:22]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, to underline that, you know, to be number two on Amazon, that means you're ahead of about like, what, 27 million other books out there in the universe. So, yeah, it is something like that. So look, I want to talk about this book and I have read this book and I told you right before we started this that, that I was actually surprised because having lived through all of this, would I want to subject myself to it again. But I read it cover to cover, I stayed up past my bedtime, which is the highest praise that I can give for a book. And I do want to talk about that, but I want to get your thoughts about this moment that we're in right now in an election and by the way, correct anything that I say, that it's an assumption, but in an election that a lot of people thought turned on the economy, on inflation, that we're now seeing the markets in absolute turmoil, global chaos, and here we are, Donald Trump in office for less than 80 days. So give me your thoughts on this moment in light of the campaign, because I'm guessing that if somebody would have told you at the end of the campaign, as insane as it was, and it was the wildest campaign in American history, that we would be in this wild moment. What would you have said? We'll start with you, Jonathan.
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Jonathan Allen
I mean, I don't know that I would have predicted this exact moment that you referenced. The possibility of stagflation and for those younger folks who have never lived through that before, it's not pretty. So I don't know that I would have predicted this moment. I will say this. You know, Trump talked about the economy. He talked about bringing down inflation. He articulated his vision for how to do that. I think there were a lot of critics who said it didn't add up. He's wanted to do tariffs across the board, tariffs for as long as he has been in the public eye, you know, long before he ever ran for president. You know, people who are more familiar with economics than I am, and certainly my economics professors in college would have told you that slapping tariffs on pretty much every country, on pretty much every item, would, would result in higher prices for consumers. You know, that we're, we're going to see. I think at the same time as you're getting higher prices, people are losing money from their 401ks. And if you're close to retirement or you're in retirement, that means at the same time prices are going up, you have less money to buy things. And that creates its own sort of negative situation because people become scared, they become panicked, and they certainly start spending less, which means that you're going to have less economic growth. But this is what Donald Trump said he was going to do. And if you don't believe that Donald Trump wants to do the things he says he does, you haven't been paying attention. And whether that is, you know, whether that is tariffs or if it is wanting to be president for the rest of his life and into someone else's lifetime, it's because he wants that.
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Charlie Sykes
Okay, Amy, your thoughts?
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Amy Parnes
I mean, I, John, couldn't have said it any better. And on the other side, you have a Democratic Party that has completely fallen down and doesn't know what to do with itself. You know, trying to not be the 2017 resistance, but is taking it up a notch and is rudderless and leaderless, and I think is trying to just find its way. But there is essentially, Donald Trump is being left unchecked right now. I mean, I think minus distance, there is no real leadership on the other side to combat it.
- [05:05]
Charlie Sykes
And, well, yeah, there are some folks like James Carville who said, you know, you don't need to just, you know, sit back and watch Donald Trump implode. He's gonna set himself on fire. Why should you interrupt that? Right. And given what's happening right now, do the Democrats actually need to do anything? If the stock market is, it's not plunging as you and I are speaking. But, you know, the bond market people are. I mean, when people around the world say that they're leaving U.S. treasury bonds, which used to be the safe harbor, that's a massive red light. So do Democrats really need to do anything, or is this thing going to meltdown on its own?
- [05:45]
Jonathan Allen
I think Cardinal's in an interesting place, Charlie, which is he can look at what is in the collective interests of all the Democrats without having the responsibility. And this isn't a criticism of him, but he doesn't have the responsibility of representing constituents who are actually feeling harm. So if you're a member of Congress, for example, or your governor and your constituents are feeling harmed, it's very difficult to sit back and say nothing for them. And at the same time, it's in the collective interests of the Democrats to get out of the way of an imploding enemy, as Napoleon or Sun Tzu or anybody else with war strategy would tell you. And so, you know, I mean, I think. I think what the Democrats need short term is, you know, is the basic pendulum shift that you tend to see in midterms, right? You. The president will overreach. The voters will decide that they don't want him to be in control of, you know, all three levers of power in Washington. And that doesn't take a lot from the minority, other than sort of pointing out when the president is overreaching or doing something wrong. I think for the future for presidential elections, they're gonna have to figure out how to not just be an anti Trump coalition. They're gonna have come forward with a vision for a modern economy in America, which they, you know, they have not done. But Joe Biden did a little bit. He did the CHIPS act, some, you know, things here and there, but it wasn't really a comprehensive vision for what does America look like 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road? And I think, you know, there are a lot of people that argue that Trump's vision for that is absolutely wrong and it's leading to the chaos right now. But he did articulate a vision, arguably a vision of 1980s America or 1950s America, but.
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Charlie Sykes
But certainly 1890s America.
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Jonathan Allen
Right, right. The Gilded Age. But the. But. But there was sort of a comprehensiveness to his approach in terms of what he was offering. And I think the Democrats are going to have to figure that out long term. How do they. How do they stop just defending the institutions that they care about? Not that they shouldn't be defending Social Security, Medicare, abortion rights, whatever, but how do they really pitch that forward into what America looks like.
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Charlie Sykes
We're going to come back to that. So see, Sammy, wanted to get your thoughts on whether Democrats actually need to right now, given the level of the chaos.
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Amy Parnes
They need to start providing an alternate plan. As John said, can't be just the resistance Trump Party. I think that is why they fell on their faces in November because people didn't feel seen, as the kids say, voters didn't feel connected to what they were offering. And they need to get back to being the party of Pell Grants and the party, you know, that speaks to working class issues. And I feel like they have lost their way. The parties have essentially kind of flipped and a lot of these Trump voters that supported him this time should really be Democrats. So they need to find those voters again and speak to them. Really speak to them.
- [08:48]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. Do you think that there is going to be, you talk to a lot of these Trump voters and he did articulate a vision and that, that, that vision was prosperity, it was growth, it was inflation. Do you have. I feel like we've been through this over and over and over again over the last decade. But, but Amy, is, is there a subsection though of Trump support that's going to peel off because they feel they were misled or that they were disillusioned? I mean, aren't they, aren't they, you know, going to look at the price of eggs and go, shit, this is not what I was told was going to happen. My 401k. Well, I thought, I thought it was going to explode.
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Amy Parnes
Yeah, it's happening.
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Charlie Sykes
Or is he immune from that, I guess is the question.
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Amy Parnes
Well, I think he is in a sense. I mean, as we, we've all predicted that he would implode at various points last presidency and one. But I do think that it, the anger is starting to brew as I'm hearing from Republicans, Republican strategists and lawmakers who are feeling very antsy about this moment and hearing from, starting to hear a little bit more from their constituents, I think. And that is sort of what I'm interested in seeing how Trump responds. Pressure from the Republican Party because he did campaign on the economy and he did make things better. And they're not better at the moment.
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Charlie Sykes
Okay, let's talk about your book, which is the only book so far to Deliver a complete 360 degree view of the 2024 election. Going deep inside the behind the scenes from Mar a Lago, the Oval Office and the vice presidents and the Vice President's residence. I mean, you know, fight has a lot of details. I guess I'm going to start with this because we have to get into some of the stuff on Biden. I got to tell you, I had a pretty strong reaction to some of the stuff in your book. I'm working up to that because I know what the reaction is going to be to our conversation. So first of all. So Jonathan, what was the biggest surprise that you found in your reporting for this book? Because I thought I knew this campaign pretty deeply inside. There were a couple of things were like, holy shit when I read them. What was your holy shit moment in reporting this book? And Amy, if you have a different.
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Jonathan Allen
One, but go ahead, Amy has a different one, which I think because for me there was this, there's this incredible moment. And I guess it was surprising because it was reported in part at the time, in very small part, which is when Joe Biden finally decides he's going to get out of the race. And he hands over to Kamala Harris. There's a phone call between the two of them. And it was reported at the time as Biden calls her, tells her he's getting out. She says, are you sure? He says yes. And then, you know, boom, he decides to endorse her. But that's not really what happened. What really happened is he calls, calls her and she's got, her staff is out in the pool house by the swimming pool at the vice president's residence and they were discussing the very topic of like the strategy of how they're going to, how they're going to get in if Biden gets out. And they have agreed that it's not going to happen anytime soon. And Biden calls and then she beckons for her brother in law, Tony west and her staff to come up and join her in the house. And Biden's got his top staffers on the line and he says he's going to get out. And she says, are you sure? And he says yes. And then she says, and he says, I got a statement. And she says, well, does it endorse me? And the answer is no. And she says, meanwhile, she knows he's got all the delegates and Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have been working behind the scenes to put together this open convention idea. So for her, she needs an endorsement immediately. And she's like, she's like, Mr. President, are you going to endorse me? And he says, you've got my support, kid. And she's like that. Well, that's not, I mean, she's been in Politics long enough to know you got to use the word endorsement. She's like, you've got to endorse me, or people are going to think that you have no faith in me, and I'm not going to be able to lock this thing down. And he says, well, maybe. Maybe on Thursday. This is on a Sunday. Maybe Thursday, because he wants to take a victory lap. He wants to celebrate himself for the magnanimous act that he thinks he's making by stepping out voluntarily when we all know he got, you know, pushed pretty damn hard before he stepped out voluntarily. He's going to, you know, compare himself to George Washington giving up power, and he wants to bask in that moment. And Harris is like, you got to endorse me. They get off the phone like they have not resolved this, and the two camps sort of talk amongst themselves, and then finally they get back on the phone and. And Biden's team says that Biden will endorse her, but it will be a separate statement. Meanwhile, Barack Obama is literally lining up phone calls to try to get people in for the open convention. One of them to Jim Clyburn. He's got set up for that evening. And Clyburn's, like, hoping that Biden will make this announcement and endorse Harris so that Clyburn can then endorse Harris before he talks to Obama, because he knows Obama's gonna try to cajole him and jawbone him into doing this open convention. So I found all that super fascinating, told for the first time in this book. When I. When I started to hear that conversation, that back and forth, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. I was like, man, Joe Biden is selfish in this moment, you know, doesn't sort of understand the importance of. Of, you know, endorsing his vice president and clearly not having either the political instincts of what was going on or the faith in her. But more likely, I think, just kind of not getting that it was his time to move on.
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Charlie Sykes
So, Amy, what was your biggest surprise in reporting this book? You had a different one.
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Amy Parnes
You know, I was thinking about it. I think the biggest. There's so many of them. I should. And I'm not just saying that because this is our book that we wrote, but we learned a lot. There were a lot of holy shit moments even starting. We start out with Nancy Pelosi watching alone in her living room.
- [14:43]
Charlie Sykes
The book.
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Amy Parnes
I mean, we never really see how this plays out behind the scenes. But what Nancy Pelosi is hearing and thinking that night is fascinating to Me, what the Democratic Party intelligentsia is thinking and hearing that night is so fascinating. But I think the biggest bombshell, and I don't want to ruin this for anyone who is going to read the book, but when you get to the and you see Kamala Harris go into election night and Tim Walls go into election night and they think they are going to win and the feeling, there's one line in particular in the book, and I think this is the biggest bombshell, but they were essentially gaslit by their entire campaign. And I'll just leave it there.
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Charlie Sykes
Oh, wow. All right. So your book. I want to focus a little bit on what you have in the book about Joe Biden, because one of the things that made 2024 just so extraordinary is the fact you have a sitting president who's running for reelection, who had nailed down the Renom and then drops out of the race after a disastrous debate. There's no parallel in American history to anything like that. But I'm going to just your indictment, which when I read it I went, oh boy, this is brutal. You talked about, in the end, Trump overcame voters concerns about his personal flaws. By the way, leaving aside the fact you have a convicted felon who was elected president, voters overcame concerns about his personal flaws. At the same time, Democrats struggled to connect with an electorate that felt gaslit by Biden's insistence that he had delivered economic prosperity and his pledge to be a bridge president. And here's the one sentence here. He tore his party asunder, leaving destroyed personal relationships in his wake as he clung to power. And when he gave it up, he kneecapped Harris by demanding unprecedented loyalty from her. That is a brutal indictment of Joe Biden. I think a lot of people were saying that history is going to be very kind to Joe Biden. I'm beginning to doubt that that's going to be the case. But let's talk about his decline because this was for millions of Americans apparently a huge shock when he walked out on that debate stage and we found out that everything the right wing media had been saying about him was true. It was a complete disaster. So I guess I have to ask you guys, was there a conscious cover up and how long did it last and who knew what when? Okay, there's a bunch that I'm unpacking there. But I mean, this is the big one because I have to say that in the days after that debate, I felt as a growing personal anger that I had been gaslit, that I had been misled about his condition. How long had this been going on. And I'm not giving anything away here because this was. It was off the record, but it was reported. I was actually in a meeting with some of the White House staff and never Trumpers the Monday after the debate. And I have to say that I won't say what anybody else said in that meeting, but what I said was I think that everybody in this room is underestimating the pure fuckitude of what just happened. So I want to talk about before the debate and after the debate. So, Jonathan, was there a conscious cover up?
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Jonathan Allen
Who.
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Charlie Sykes
Who knew what when.
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Jonathan Allen
I think there was a conscious effort to cover for Joe Biden. And the reason that I don't use the term cover up is that to me that it connotes a criminal conspiracy that I don't have evidence for.
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Charlie Sykes
But was it a conspiracy, though? Was it a conspiracy, though, to hide his condition not just from the general public, but from other people who apparently were also taken by shock? I mean, it was. Yes.
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Jonathan Allen
I mean, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. There was a small circle of, of White House aides who had, you know, frequent access to him and of course, family. So the first lady, Mike Donilon and Steve Rochetti, who were two, two senior advisors at the White House, Anita Dunn, who was a senior advisor at the White House, Annie Thomasini and, and Anthony Bernal, who were the personal aides to, to Biden and to Jill Biden for years. I mean, they had up close contact with Joe Biden. They never said to anybody publicly or even people lower than them in the White House, that, that this was a problem. But they saw him. And the reason that we know they saw him is because we know people who were in the outer rings that saw him struggling physically, struggling mentally, sometimes. Members of Congress, we report many of these episodes in the book, as, you know, Charlie having read it, but yeah, you know, he didn't recognize Eric Swalwell at a congressional picnic in 2023. Eric Swalwell's on TV about as often as advertisements, right? I mean, like, he's on TV constantly. And he ran against Joe Biden for president in 2020. He was one of the Democratic primary guys. They fought on a debate stage and Biden just didn't recognize.
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Charlie Sykes
So this is 2023, this is 20 me. You talk in the book about that. There was maybe a clear signs of decline in early 2024, but we're talking now about 2023. I mean, how far back did it go that people saw, wow, this guy has lost something. Either one of you, I mean, I.
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Amy Parnes
Think in the lead up to the debate, it starts to really change. I mean, we talked to people who mentioned the Swalwell incident and then on from. Yeah, really, really start to notice a major decline. You know, he looks. He gets out of his limo and he looks sort of lost, and he can't quite follow, you know, what's going on. He. He has a makeup artist. So this is. This deals with optics around his physical appearance. But a makeup artist meets him first thing that he does every morning when he's overseas, they bring in this makeup artist to completely, you know, revamp his appearance. So clearly the White House was aware of this larger narrative about his age and about his mental acuity.
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Charlie Sykes
How wide was that circle, though? How many other people in Hollywood, in Congress, saw it and decide to keep it to themselves?
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Jonathan Allen
I think it's a. I think it's a good question, Charlie. And I think it really. It's really on a. On a spectrum of your proximity to him. Right. If you're close to him, you see it a lot and you decide not to say anything. And if you see him at a congressional picnic once a year, maybe you figure that was the worst day. You're not sure. But this also speaks to, like, the, you know, the problem of Joe Biden deciding to run for reelection without any conversation, without any discussion. Like, the conversations that he had with his staff about running for reelection were about how he would run free election. And when he would announce it, there was never really a question of whether he would run for reelection, even though he had implied heavily to the American people that he was going to serve one term. So you go back to that, that's on him. And then when you've got a president seeking reelection, anyone who's close to him who tells him that he's making a mistake is soon going to be cast out of the inner circle. And these people care about being in the inner circle. They've spent their whole lives working to get to the point where they're next to a president. And look, you would like to think that if it was you, and I think Amy would like to think if it was her. I would like to think that if it was me. And I saw that. I saw what I saw on the debate stage behind closed doors with the President of the United States, I would say, hey, that's the guy with his finger on the button. Someone needs to blow the whistle, right?
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Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, that's the other question is the media coverage of it. You know, there was some coverage of it, but I Guess the reason we're spending time on this and we're getting blowback. I don't know. You've probably already gotten, you know, why you. Beating a dead horse, you know, you know, Donald Trump is setting the world on fire. But I think it's important to keep asking the question, how did we get here?
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Jonathan Allen
Because.
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Charlie Sykes
Because I think that the Biden administration had one prime directive, which was to keep Donald Trump from returning to power. And they clearly failed on a number of levels. But clearly the central decision was Joe Biden's decision to run for reelection, to read the midterm elections as kind of a green light. But how. Look, there was a split. How did the media do. I mean, leaving the political world aside and the insiders aside, should the media have been more aggressive in reporting on all of this? Because I remember Even late into 2024, there was a lot of coverage of the, you know, fake news and the, you know, attempts basically to gloss it over. But give me your sense, though, of how the watchdogs behaved.
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Amy Parnes
I mean, I think it's unfair to loop us all in one bucket. For, for starters, we all. I covered the president. John did as well. We all attempted to take various stabs at this story so much that the White House would often push back and push back hard and threaten cut off access and everything else.
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Charlie Sykes
Oh, really?
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Amy Parnes
I mean, oh, yeah, it's been, it's, it was pretty routine for people to, you know, say that our reporting is garbage and, you know, how dare we accused the president of cognitive decline. Start there. But I do think that there, there were lots. There was a great deal of reporting from myself, from my colleagues getting at this story. It's not like anyone was asleep at the switch. It's not like we weren't to get this. But the thing about our book is that, you know, when once they leave office, once they, the floodgates kind of.
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Charlie Sykes
Open and people talk about it.
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Amy Parnes
These various narratives.
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Charlie Sykes
Well, I also want to introduce another phrase because I'm sure that you encountered it as well, which was, people aren't going to like this. The blue became known as Blue maga, which was this pro Biden group that would attack anyone who would raise these questions. And this happened to people that I was associated with as well. You know, why do you keep talking about Biden being old? Why do you keep talking about. And there was that bubble, that was a very, very tight bubble that pushed back against people in the media. And one of the reasons why there wasn't more discussion, I think, in the resistance was that there was a, you know, there were a lot of people would really, you know, beat the shit out of you if you brought this, including after the debate. I mean, that period after the debate is extraordinary. And it's extraordinary in your book, you know, the maneuvering back and forth. First of all, how many of the insiders were genuinely shocked by the debate? I mean, genuinely shocked as opposed to, okay, now it's unavoidable. We have to do something about it. You know, Jonathan, you actually have the behind the scenes account of people who are watching it, who realize in real time it was over. But were they taken completely by surprise, or did this just give them the incentive to do something about it? Jonathan, you're muted.
- [26:30]
Jonathan Allen
Sorry about that. I think the people at the very top of the Democratic Democratic Party knew that there was a problem before the debate. One of the reasons I think that is that Nancy Pelosi went to Joe Biden and urged him not to debate Trump. And she did it in a way, as we report in the book for the first time. And she did it in a way that, you know, was sort of aimed toward his ego. Right? Mr. President, don't lower yourself to debate Donald Trump was the way she framed it. But if Nancy Pelosi thought that, that Joe Biden had a chance of beating Donald Trump in a debate, if she was unconcerned about his fitness to compete on stage, she would have urged him to debate Trump, not to stay away from him. Barack Obama saw Joe Biden in person just a couple of weeks before the debate with George Clooney, who ended up writing an op ed about, you know, how bad Joe Biden was at this fundraiser that they managed to not mention until after the debate. And, and Obama had to, like, you know, lead Biden off stage by the wrist, you know, sort of like a chaperone. So I think that there were people at the very top that knew there was a problem. The other problem, you know, there's a problem with Joe Biden's mental acuity. But the other problem, and this is the one that, that I think bothered them the most, was they knew that Joe Biden was trailing Trump and had been. And the message coming from the White House in the campaign was this is a super close race and, you know, yada, yada, yada. But the reality was Trump had had opened up a small but stable and significant lead to the point that the leaders of the Democratic Party thought even before the debate that Biden was on track to lose. And it's one of the reasons that they decided to do an early, early debate. They wanted to, the White House wanted to change the trajectory of the race, and they did, just not in the way that they had hoped to.
- [28:28]
Charlie Sykes
So in that period between the debate and when Joe Biden finally, very reluctantly dropped out, was there one decisive moment? Because your book has so many turning points, you could say that was obviously a turning point. This was the key moment. Was there one thing? Because I guess I continue to be surprised by how serious they were about staying in the race after that disastrous debate performance. I mean, I looked at that and I thought there's just no way that, number one, that he's going to be able to survive, that he's going to be able to do this campaign, that he's going to be able to beat Donald Trump and quite frankly, raise real questions about his ability to serve another four years in office. But they were adamant they were going to stay in. They had a lot of the cards. So, Amy, was there, is there one thing that stuck out with you? Was it Nancy Pelosi? Was it Barack Obama? I mean, who was it who finally delivered the, I'm sorry to use this phrase, the dagger in this scenario.
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Amy Parnes
I think it was collective in a way, Charlie, but I mean, there was a one, two punch that came one day where Nancy Pelosi appears on Morning Joe. And we do tell the behind the scenes moment leading up to that in the book. And then, you know, the op ed featuring George Clooney. And we also detail how they, the campaign tried their best to kill that, using Jeffrey Katzenberg as the, trying to go after it and put the kibosh on it. And they couldn't. And so you had those two moments sort of playing out. And that kind of resulted in the downfall, you know. And then, of course, Joe Biden goes to Nevada, gets Covid. It's brutal for him. It's almost, you know, the debate starts with him and his cold. And we detail that in the book and how he prepped around the cold. The other bookend is Covid, and that really is the nail in the coffin. And we go into great detail about that, about how he was a lot sicker than people knew about. He was having respiratory. He was actually very weak, a weakened leader at perhaps his greatest political moment when he has to make the biggest decision of his political career. And so I think all of that collectively has a huge, tremendous impact on.
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Charlie Sykes
Okay, so I want to fast forward, Jonathan, to another this remarkable day, the day that Joe Biden drops out. You talked about the phone call between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden where she begs him. But what's also extraordinary is, and it felt extraordinary at the time, how quickly she put together the nomination. But when you read your book, you realize that that was not a foregone conclusion necessarily. And I was surprised to realize how resistant both Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi were to Kamala Harris. Neither of them were Kamala Harris fans and apparently rather strongly not Kamala Harris fans. Could you talk to me about that?
- [31:38]
Jonathan Allen
Yeah. So, I mean, Pelosi is from the same place as Kamala Harris. She has had a bird's eye view of Kamala Harris's political career as a local prosecutor, as the state attorney general, United States senator. There are few people I've ever come across, if any, who have the political judgment that Nancy Pelosi has and the understanding of what it takes to. To be a successful politician. And she just never thought Kamala Harris had it. She's just not a fan of Harris. And, you know, we, we have a scene in the book where, you know, she's. Pelosi's talking to the California delegation and, you know, she's talking about, you know, how there might be an open primary and somebody's, you know, asked like, well, you're going to support Harris, and she kind of stays away from it. And it becomes very clear to the Biden people very quickly, they sort of summarize Nancy Pelosi's view in this mantra of he goes, she goes, meaning, get rid of Biden, get rid of Harris. So, yeah, and Obama's never been a huge Harris fan. I mean, the most memorable thing that Barack Obama ever did before this campaign regarding Kamala Harris was say that she was the best looking attorney general in the country, which I am sure did not sit well with either Kamala Harris or Michelle Obama. You know, when you're president of the United States, don't go around saying which attorney general turns you on. You know, it's kind of a terrible moment for him. But he, no, he didn't have any faith in her either. He, you know, he tried to set up this open convention. I think if you. I think the sort of COVID story from his camp was, you know, they think that that's the right way to do things, you know, even if she locks it down. But like, he was actively working against her. And she, what, she beat both Pelosi and Obama, which speaks to some ability to do internal politicking. And she did it with the help ultimately of Biden and of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
- [33:43]
Charlie Sykes
And Jim Clyburn, who turned out to be the kingmaker again. Right. Because Obama calls him in your account and try to get him on board, and he's already. He's pro Kamala. So, Amy, I'm gonna get your take on this because, you know, a lot of this, this entire narrative of what happened, Joe Biden staying in the race, the resistance, goes back to conventional view of Kamala Harris, that she was going to be a disastrously bad candidate. And I will admit I was one of those that circulated the videos, the social media videos, comparing her to, you know, dweep and everything. During the campaign, though, she comes out and comes out strong. And there was a narrative for a very long time that she was running a pretty flawless campaign. I mean, I, I'm. I'm pretty cynical about candidates, and I actually was quite. And was prepared to be disappointed. I was surprised by how well she did. But, I mean, obviously she loses in. In the end. But give me your sense, though, of Kamala Harris as a, as a candidate. I think the expectations were incredibly low. She exceeded them, but she fell short. So was she a good candidate or not? What is your take on her?
- [34:56]
Amy Parnes
She was a good candidate, but she also had a very condensed timeline. She inherited Joe Biden's campaign, along with his people and his message. We detail in the book about how she's almost pigeonholed by him and handcuffed. She can't. She can't go either way. He calls her right before the debate and says, no daylight, kid. And so even. And that explains.
- [35:27]
Charlie Sykes
Was that a pivotal moment when in your book, that feels like this was the moment at which he kneecapped her by making it impossible for her to separate herself from his unpopular presidency.
- [35:39]
Amy Parnes
Exactly. And think about the great chorus at the time was why isn't she herself? And, you know, they had. They had prepped her to do. To say different things, to say, you know, that she was proud of the record, but you know, that she was pivot and she had different ideas in the future. And, and that all came to be on the View when she's asked about that. And she can't. She says that there. She can't think of a thing that she would do differently. And meanwhile, her AIDS are just so aghast at that moment. They just can't believe what she just said because she had practiced and rehearsed what to say in that moment. But I do think as. As you talked about earlier, she does have some political skill. But. But, you know, at the same time, she was also Sort of handicapped as vice president. I think a lot of people said that she wasn't, you know, they didn't use her. Utilize her in the right way, set her up to run for such an office. And so I think all of these things kind of played out in the end.
- [36:44]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I mean, yeah, her performance in the debate was. Was, I believe, the most dominant performance I've ever seen. But. Yes, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Jonathan.
- [36:51]
Jonathan Allen
I was just going to add to it. I mean, I think if you look at the failings on the Democratic side, and of course, there are strengths in any campaign, too, even losing campaigns, but if you look at the failures on the Democratic side and particularly the leaders of the Democratic Party party, there are a number of sort of moral failures. And. And by that, I mean, you know, Joe Biden deciding to run for president at, you know, at the expense of his party and. And, you know, in his view of the country, his unwillingness to let his legacy be you know, tarnished a little bit from Kamala Harris distancing herself, his desire to, like, hold back from endorsing. I mean, these are. These are sort of what, you know, what you would think of as moral failures. And even some of the other leaders who let their own priorities get in the way of what everybody else, what the voters actually cared about in the Democratic Party, which is preventing the second Trump term that we're now seeing. Whereas Kamala Harris, I think when you look at her failures as a candidate, they're political failures. So aside from her views on issues of the day, I mean, you can judge somebody being moral immoral on that. But I think, you know, she exhibited this in tremendous loyalty to Biden, arguably too much. I mean, you know, it was a flaw as well as a strength.
- [38:12]
Charlie Sykes
But she has agency. She didn't have to go along, right?
- [38:15]
Jonathan Allen
She didn't have to go along. And she felt loyal to Biden, who had put her on the ticket even after she'd attacked him back in 2020 on the debate stage, she did not lose sight of the sort of North Star, of what this campaign was, you know, designed to be about. I think she tried to. And we report in the book, you know, it didn't. Didn't always work. But she tried to limit the sort of infighting within the campaign. And we have a whole chapter called fuckery about some. But, you know, I think she tried to get her people to not, you know, engage in that, to not get caught up in their own petty jealousies and interests. And I think her people largely did that even as some of the Biden holdovers were pretty ruthless internally. And I guess the other thing I would just say on that score, you know, in terms of, you know, in terms of the sort of morality of the Harris campaign, is she, one of the reasons she didn't want to throw the Biden legacy under the bus was she felt like it was dishonest to go out there and disown things that she had been part of. And we always ask for authenticity in politicians, and I think we got the real Kamala Harris, you know, good, bad and indifferent, or good, bad and ugly, all warts and all whatever in this campaign. And, you know, I see that as a, you know, as a moral victory for her. And moral victories don't, don't, don't stop Donald Trump for being president. But, like, I just see her in a different category, and it's sort of a, a positive light in the way she conducted herself in this campaign that was somewhat refreshing, even if it was not successful.
- [39:56]
Charlie Sykes
Amy. I mean, in your book, she, you know, Biden comes off much worse than she does, which is, you know, an unusual thing, by the way, that chapter on the internal fighting, how she basically had to have her campaign taken over by the Biden folks, and the Biden folks kept sidelining her own people. I mean, it's kind of inside baseball, but it gives you an insight into how difficult it was to take over under those circumstances. Okay, so let me give you the cosmic question, Amy. In the end, with all of his flaws, why did the American people elect Donald Trump? Why did he win? Was it inflation? Was it the price of eggs? What was it? Was it just his beautiful winning personality?
- [40:39]
Amy Parnes
No, I don't think it was. I think he, he ran a better. And that's hard for here, but he did. It was more disciplined. It was tighter. It was, he spoke. He had a message. He knew Exactly. Like in 2016, he had a message back then, too. He knew exactly what he was for. He knew exactly how to brand himself. He's a, he's a really great marketer. Brander.
- [41:08]
Charlie Sykes
And, but, but, but let me just stop you there, because, because in real time, it felt as if this was one of the most undiscipline. Watch those rallies and the batshittery and the craziness and the way he would ramble all over that. What you're saying, though, is that there was a different campaign that was, in fact perceived by voters as being more disciplined. Guys like me, we're focused on what's coming out of his mouth. Which is like, what the hell? This is, you know, Trump at his most deranged. And yet you're saying he ran a disciplined campaign. So talk to me about that.
- [41:44]
Amy Parnes
He did. That's what. And he, he knew what people wanted in the sense that he spoke to them. He knew that the economy was deal. I mean, keep in mind that yes, he does ramble, and yes, he is rather undisciplined personally, but he campaign apparatus knew exactly what to do. And they ran a different playbook, a better playbook. And Democrats did. Democrats were still saying, oh, we have more boots on the ground in swing states. You know, they were saying, we've raised more money. We've, you know, they ran a smarter campaign. And that's, that's really hard for that for some people to stomach right now.
- [42:25]
Charlie Sykes
Jonathan, your answer. Why. Why did Trump win ultimately?
- [42:29]
Jonathan Allen
Yeah, I'm going to put it in the, In I think, the simplest terms I can. I think the American public wanted change, and Joe Biden did not offer change. And Kamala Harris did not offer a substantive change from Joe Biden. She refused to distance herself or come up with a plan that looked any different from Biden. So the public want to change. Trump offered it. He didn't offer so much change that, that the average voter, that the median voter looked at it and said, wow, that's way too chaotic. To Amy's point about the campaign itself having a lot more discipline and, you know, measured against the Democrats saying, we're going to keep doing the exact same thing. And when people were worried about their pocketbooks, they were worried about. About crime, worried about various things. It was a change election. And the Democrats said, let's just keep going exactly as we are also.
- [43:23]
Amy Parnes
Let's.
- [43:24]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
- [43:27]
Amy Parnes
That was portrayed the day of the attempted assassination.
- [43:31]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [43:33]
Amy Parnes
Explains what the perception of Donald Trump and how he wants the public to perceive him, you know, in probably the scariest moment of his life, he knows exactly what to do. And that image will be one of the most iconic political images of our lifetime.
- [43:55]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, strong. Strong versus weak. But of course, you know, we also have to ask the question, did Kamala Harris underperform so, so badly because she was a black woman? You know, what was the role of gender and race? Because a lot of Democrats are now gonna ask themselves, you know, can we ever nominate a woman again? Is America ever going to be ready for something like that? I mean, did she code as too woke? Was. Was Trump able to actually more successfully portray her as radical, a radical for them, as opposed to Ours because of who she was. What do you think?
- [44:33]
Jonathan Allen
He was able to use her own words to do that? Right.
- [44:37]
Amy Parnes
The.
- [44:37]
Jonathan Allen
The most effective political ad I've ever seen in my entire life was the trans ad.
- [44:42]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, my God, yes, run.
- [44:43]
Jonathan Allen
And it's the words out of her own mouth that she wants the state, meaning taxpayers, to pay for transgender surgeries for people who are in prison and are undocumented immigrants. It's like four issues in one. That ends with the narrator saying, kamala Harris is for they them. President Trump is for you. So an overall message with four subunits in it is just this incredibly damaging ad, using her own words about how extreme she is. And her campaign's decision, using their brilliant data analytics, was to not respond. And as we write in the book, they were getting pressure from all around the Democratic Party to respond, and they kept saying, bill Clinton's one of them. He called up, he said, hey, I've seen this trans ad a million times all over the place. People are asking me about it on rope lines, and, you know, y'all ought to do something about it. And the answer that he gets back is, you know, from Jenna Mali Dillon in the campaign, is our data analytics say that ad isn't very effective, and they say that our responses aren't that effective, so we're just not going to do anything about it. And, you know, look, you don't need a data team to tell you that that ad was brutal and it had the effect.
- [45:58]
Charlie Sykes
And everywhere.
- [45:59]
Amy Parnes
Everywhere, Everywhere.
- [46:00]
Jonathan Allen
Every football game, every hockey game, during the baseball playoffs. I mean, men must have seen that ad more than they saw their families.
- [46:09]
Charlie Sykes
During that in Wisconsin. Yeah, that's true, Jimmy.
- [46:12]
Jonathan Allen
And so, you know, I look at that as sort of emblematic of, you know, a sort of failure to understand the basic common sense of politics at the. At the campaign leadership level. Even when someone is smart about politics, as Bill Clinton is calling, saying, hey, you got to do something about this. This is. It's not some random guy. This is the random guy that can walk into Diner in America and walk out with a friend, you know, from. Of everybody in that place. And he's like, this thing's killing her. So, I mean, I look at that, and I'm like, this is just, you know, pure campaign bullshit failure. And just. I can't even fathom it. But to your question about can a person of color or a woman of color or a woman win the presidency? I don't think that this election or 2016 proved that a woman can't win. I think that the bar may be higher in some places. We've never seen a woman elected governor or senator in the state of Pennsylvania, or a person of color, for that matter. In those, in those offices, bar might be a little higher. But I think what, what we really learned from this election is we just, you know, the Democrats need a better, better quality of candidate and maybe, maybe shake up some of the consultant class that's been running these cookie cutter campaigns for the last, you know, four or five cycles.
- [47:26]
Charlie Sykes
Amy, want to give you the last word. Any of this.
- [47:30]
Amy Parnes
I completely agree with John, obviously. I think that ad, coupled with the you ad that kind of let Kamala Harris speak in her own words, those were both of them deadly, her campaign.
- [47:46]
Charlie Sykes
They were absolutely deadly. And then the fact that the Trump campaign put what is something like $100 million behind one ad was certainly an indication that they thought that that was, was decisive. And being in a swing state here in Wisconsin, I cannot, I cannot overstate how often that ad was on. And I'm not sure the Democrats have still gotten it because my sense is they're still kind of in denial about those cultural issues. You know, every, you know, that they continue to think that, you know, that it's the economy, stupid. When I think one of the kind of the weird tricks of the right has been, yeah, the economy might matter, but we're going to play on the cultural playing field. And if you guys aren't going to answer back, we own that. And so we'll see whether they adapt. Hey, the book. The book is Fight Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes. It is a great read. I have to say that as a political junkie, sometimes I think I knew this stuff. But this, this, it's filled with, with good shit, guys. It really is. I strongly recommend. And so thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Amy, for joining me. I appreciate it very much, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. We do this because obviously this week reminds us more than ever that we are not the crazy ones. Thanks.