Scranton Joe vs. Park Ave Trump

And later, George Stephanopoulos talks to Dan about covering 2024 in his new book full of untold stories about the White House Situation Room. But first, Dan, Donald Trump doesn't seem to be having much fun at his criminal trial. He doesn't? No, he's not. Unlike all those other people who have fun at their criminal trials.

He's complaining that the court isn't allowing his supporters to protest outside, which isn't true. It's just that less than a dozen have showed up. He's complaining that the courtroom is too cold, that he has to sit up straight for too long. And mostly he's complaining about his gag order, which he seems to have violated multiple times, though we are waiting for a ruling on that from Judge Mershawn, which could come at any moment. Trump also had to sit through testimony from the prosecution's first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who testified that he personally spoke to Trump and Michael Cohen about a catch-and-kill scheme where Trump would pay Pecker to bury political damaging stories about him and publish politically damaging and often false stories about his opponents.

Trump's defense is that he didn't know about any of this and didn't have any affairs. But you know what? Our boy, Mitt Romney, isn't buying it. I think.

Prosecution argued that Trump committed election fraud, pure and simple, accused him of orchestrating a criminal conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 election. Trump's lawyer argued that Trump really did reimburse Michael Cohen for legal expenses and that there was nothing illegal about Cohen's payment to Stormy Daniels, nor is there anything wrong with trying to influence an election. He said, quote, it's called democracy. Dan, what'd.

Totally impartial juror. right here. I should have my merch on right now. I actually thought the opening statements were a very interesting window into the not just the legal strategies, but the political messaging strategies of both sides, right? From the perspective of the prosecution or the people trying to defeat Donald Trump, there's clearly an effort to try to make this incident, which happened eight years ago, about originally personal conduct, to make it matter to voters, now, right?

Why should you care? Why is this more than just something Donald Trump did to hide up a personal misconduct? For the defense, there's an effort to take what the prosecution's alleged to be a major criminal conspiracy and make it essentially a paperwork error that would never be prosecuted were it not for that paperwork error being committed on Donald Trump's behalf, right? This is a political effort, and both sides are trying to... And you can see the challenge of making this falsifying business records to say that it really was an effort to interfere in the election, to hide things from voters.

That requires a logical leap for jurors and voters. And for the defense side, there's a lot of... We'll get into some of the very compelling testimony you've heard already, but there is... You can see how this fits very well with Donald Trump's narrative of victimization, right? And you can see a couple of jurors who are pretty skeptical of political institutions and law enforcement and government buying that argument.

So I thought it was a real interesting window into how they're thinking about the case. And this is one of those rare times where the legal strategy and the political strategy, I think, align.

. I noticed in the prosecution's opening statement, they did preview a lot of hard evidence that there's going to be a tape of Trump telling Michael Cohen to pay off Karen McDougal, who's the Playboy model that he allegedly had an affair with for a year, which, of course, would make it hard for Trump to say that Michael Cohen is just a liar who's acting on his own. And so I do think that they will... They definitely signaled that they have a lot of evidence beyond just... They know that relying solely on Michael Cohen and his testimony is probably not going to get them all the way there.

So I think that it was interesting that they were previewing that they had other evidence that they're going to introduce. And then I thought it was interesting that Trump's lawyers... The challenge that all of Trump's lawyers have is that he doesn't want them to tell even a little bit of truth about that he did anything wrong. And so you could imagine a defense attorney saying, like, sure, he was involved in this catch-and-kill scheme, and sure, he was doing this, but he had no idea about the business records and everything else he did was wrong. But the defense has to be like, oh, no, Donald Trump is perfect in every way.

And he was shocked, shocked when he found out that Michael Cohen was committing crimes behind his back. It's just not believable to most people. But you kind of have to do it to keep the client happy.

And that has been his political downfall in many, many instances.

This is now his pollster is using this line. Do we think turning Trump into the Nelson Mandela of America, do we think people are going to buy that?

Ted Cruz shamed by porn star. Another one, Ted Cruz sex scandal, five secret mistresses. Not believable. And also shady lady who could ruin Marco Rubio. There was also a headline about Ben Carson leaving his sponge in someone's brain because he's a brain surgeon after surgery.

They just put them together and copy paste it. It's just like, this is what the prosecution is trying to do here, which is to get away from the, either this is just personal sex stuff, or this is just some business records and paperwork issues. This was a presidential campaign that was working and directing a major media company to just be its propaganda arm for an entire campaign and then hiding it from people. I mean, that, that does seem like more of a, more of a conspiracy than.

Any of those on cable,

And all of those things help prove why this was not a mistake. So I agree with all that. I thought it was, I mean, you could not ask for a story better designed for media coverage in this day and age than Donald Trump working with the National Enquirer to put up a bunch of disinformation. Like that. is that.

I don't know, from a political perspective, that people are going to hear this and be shocked that Donald Trump was working with the National Enquirer, a journalistic institution, which most people hold in very high esteem.

At least go with like one to two.

So I think this matters more in the legal case than it does politically. Just ultimately, and this is something I've been thinking more and more about as this trial has gone on, is that, while a conviction could be very meaningful, more revelations and evidence that Donald Trump is a crook is not particularly decisive in this election. That's kind of already.

Now, you're relying on David Pecker's testimony as well. They started the scheme there. They paid off McDougal. They paid off a doorman who said that Trump had a child with a mistress and that her story turned out not to be true, but they paid to kill it anyway. And then, of course, there was the Stormy Daniel one, which Pecker was like, we're not, I'm not, I'm not paying to kill this one because you didn't reimburse me for the other ones yet, which is so, which is very believable, by the way.

So clearly, you know, laying the groundwork that Trump knew this was going on, this was the plan all along. Also, Pecker testified that he witnessed Trump handling accounts, payable paperwork, like the kind that are at issue here, personally signing checks after reviewing the attached documentation, which I think is also very helpful for the falsifying business records. Cause you're like, oh, he's not a details guy, but here he is like looking through contracts, signing his name. So, you know, that's, that's probably helpful to the prosecution. There was also a separate hearing on Tuesday about Trump potentially violating his gag order.

Um, our old friend Norm Eisen wrote that, uh, he thinks judge Mershawn will almost certainly hold Trump in contempt. Trump and his allies seem convinced that, uh, complaining about this gag order can help Trump politically. Uh, are they right? Or have they spent too much time on, uh, on truth, social, true social? Um, I think there isn't,

And so I'll be very interested to see what the penalty is. I hope it's more than the $1,000 or whatever. it is per violation that we, it was talked about previously. in terms of the political merits of this. I'm being gagged argument.

It would be more believable if he was not delivering this argument at a press conference.

People were mean to him. He's fighting with celebrities. He's just, it's just all about himself, and he lost. And I think for most of this campaign thus far, he's been pretty disciplined, judged on the Trump scale, right? This is not compared to any normal human, but judged for Trump.

He's been pretty disciplined about making, having more of his 2016 message, more, I'm fighting for you. I'm going to take on these people for you. They're coming after me because they really hate you. And he has kind of lost that since the trial started. It's all about him.

He looks whiny and weak on a daily basis. in all these press conferences. The judge won't let me speak. And he's holding up printouts of articles that he can't read out loud. And that just, that is not why people like him.

It's not as what has brought some people back into his camp. It's kind of the exact sort of behavior and demeanor that push people away from him in 2020.. So I think it's been pretty bad for him.

They're up there. The New York Times is live blogging it with an entirely impossible to follow user experience that I can't stand.

People are tweeting about it, but it's just, it, if this was happening in 2018, 2016,, 2018, 2019, if you went, this is not like a.

He was president of the United States. Even if he wasn't running for president this time, if he wasn't the nominee, this should be a gigantic deal. And it just feels like maybe it's just technologically and culturally impossible to grab the nation's attention, but the nation's attention is not grabbed by this. And that is probably very good for Donald Trump, presuming he doesn't end up in prison at the end of it.

We're just, we're just a TV. We're just a visual TV culture and have been for a long time, but we're just not a linear TV country. We're not linear, but like, well, you'd be looking at your phone. You'd be looking at your laptop. I mean, wherever, right.

People are watching shit on their screens and, and a lot of people just aren't reading. Yeah. I mean, I think if the, if it was being.

Uh, Biden got some help with that today when he won the endorsement of North America's building trades unions, uh, which CNN reports will invest in an eight figure organizing program to try to deliver their 250,000 members in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Uh, the head of the union, Sean McGarvey, said of Biden quote, it's almost like the perfect leader was sent at the perfect time for working people. It's quite an endorsement. Uh, and then McGarvey had.

He assured me I'm the president of the United States. I'll just call Mitch. I'll tell him to put it in the bill. Is everybody going to love me? Everybody loves me, right?

Is everybody going to love me? Yes. Mr. President, you fix the pension. Everybody's gonna love you.

That was wasted breath. There was lots of other things put in that bill. There was tax cuts put in that bill for rich people. What I love about that hit on Donald.

I'm just going to do tax cuts for rich people is like. so on, brand for Donald Trump. I mean, it's pitch perfect messaging. It's great. It's like one of the better.

I wanted to play the clip because it's like one of the better attacks on Trump that I have heard. And in terms of what's going to actually resonate with working class, middle.

. He acknowledged that the leadership of the unions, probably more pro Biden than the actual members. But I do feel like this will be very helpful this time around, particularly in those, uh, in the battleground states where they have a lot of members, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's important.

I think.

He is, and that, that is important. Unions are more popular than they've ever been. And it also just politics is honest. when you boil it all down, throw us all the bullshit we talk about all the time. It all really comes down to is who do voters think you're fighting for?

And if you fight for unions, you're fighting for workers. and having that, the support of unions, having that persona and that knowledge that he is someone who fights for unions, having gone to that picket line during the UAW strike, that's, that is all great stuff. And I think it is very valuable for him, as he makes the case in these states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, et cetera.

And, um, they also, um, raised the threshold for overtime pay for, uh, hourly employees, which is huge. So, like they have delivered quite a bit, um, to working people, um, from a union perspective and from a non-union perspective too.

So I want to talk a little bit about this Scranton versus Park Ave message that Biden's been hitting. The New York times, uh, framed the approach in a way that was, uh, scientifically designed to get a mention on this podcast. quote, can Biden make Trump seem like Mitt Romney? A lot of Mitt Romney in this podcast, who knew? Uh, the piece is about whether Biden can do to Trump what Obama did to Romney in 2012,, which was define him early as an out of touch, rich guy who wants to help other rich people.

I think Trump has proven to be a tougher target than Romney on this for a host of reasons we can talk about, but do you think, uh, you think that's, you think, Biden.

that's not there. No, the politicians don't care about them. They care about big money. They're not thinking about a politics doesn't work for them. And so they're checking out.

They're thinking of not voting or voting for a third party candidate. And one of the best ways to bring those people back into Biden's camp, you know, these often these potential third party voters, double haters, whatever you want to call them, is to tell people about some of his economic accomplishments and the specific economic accomplishments where he is taking on a powerful special interest on their behalf. And the most popular one, as we've talked about before, is fighting the prescription drug companies to lower prescription drug costs, to cap insulin at $35, opposing tax cuts for additional tax cuts for corporations and the rich, protecting Social Security and Medicare. We also know from polling from Blueprint, we've talked about before on this podcast, that working class voters believe one of their biggest concerns about Donald Trump is that he will give tax cuts to the rich, tax cuts to corporations. And so you have a message here that Biden, I thought, delivered quite well, that Joe Biden is going to fight for working people.

He has delivered for them. He's going to lower prescription drug costs. He's going to lower your health care costs. He's going to protect Social Security and Medicare. And he's going to fight against additional tax cuts for the rich.

And that works with Trump, because that is not going to work with everyone. But for a core slice of voters, I think it's an excellent message. And it tells a story about who Joe Biden is, that's more important than the details of the white papers that undergird those policies.

Great. It really is about what he's going to do when he's in office and what he did do when his office. again, his only accomplishment, his only big legislative accomplishment when he was president, was passing a tax cut for the rich that the rest of us are still paying for. And now he wants to do another one. That's I mean, that's it.

That's, and I don't think you're going to necessarily like, I don't think Biden can. It's going to be hard for Biden to overcome Trump's advantage on the economy, because people have these hazy memories that we've talked about before of, oh, during the Trump administration, I felt like I was better off. inflation was low until, of course, the pandemic hit. And so I think that's going to be tough to beat. But I think you can battle him to a draw, or at least make the case that.

Yeah, but he was really looking out for the rich, and he's going to do it again. And Joe Biden's been.

And that's not a good comparison for Biden. It's not his fault. It's largely Trump's fault. But it's the reality. if you're talking about if the focus of people's minds is on cost of groceries, that is not the right comparison.

The better comparison is not past versus present, it's future versus future. Right? Who's going to fight you going forward, and that that tax cut that Donald Trump passed in 2018 expires at the end of next year. Donald Trump not only wants to renew that, which is going to cost, I think, somewhere north of $3 trillion, overwhelmingly benefit corporations, the wealthy, he wants to expand it and further lower tax rates for corporations. Joe Biden doesn't want to do that.

He wants to help working class and middle class families, right? He wants to protect Social Security, Medicare. And, if you do, Donald Trump's tax cut, the only way that we will end up paying for that is to cut Social Security, Medicare, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. So he wants to cut your Social Security, cut your Medicare, make your healthcare premiums higher, all in service of paying for a tax cut for rich people.

McCormick started his campaign at an event where he responded to a question about the high cost of gas by telling the voter, hey, here's my wife, she's on the board of Exxon. Just like, what was he thinking? Was he joking? And then, just last week, The Times ran a story about how McCormick's claim that he grew up on a family farm is a bit misleading. He actually lived in a mansion 10 minutes down the road because his father was a college president, and they merely owned the farm where his mother raised Arabian horses as a hobby.

How amazing is that? Like what? We haven't talked about this race yet. But even though it's, it's probably not as tough as Sherrod Brown's race in Ohio or Jon Tester's race in Montana. And even though Bob Casey is a beloved Pennsylvanian, and Dave McCormick only owns an Arabian horse farm there, this is a very competitive Senate race.

How do you see this one? And do you think that Casey can rerun the campaign that John Fetterman ran against Dr. Oz, with some success here?

Like you can't, there's not really, there's not a place to find another.

Dr. Oz was a little bit like Trump, in the sense that he was well known, and weird. And the Fetterman campaign brilliantly took his weird, out of touch, rich guy stuff and made him pay for it, right? The being from New Jersey, the very famous crudite video from the grocery store, which I know everyone listening to this podcast has definitely seen 1000 times. But just on a purely as a purely political matter, put aside, like social virality, just like what would work in an ad or a focus group.

Dave McCormick telling voters worried about the high cost of gas that he he's got he's on it because his wife is on the board of Exxon is 1000 times worse than Dr. Oz thinking somehow that salsa goes on a crudite platter, right? It's just, or like anything Mitt Romney did. I mean,

That's all they knew about him when that campaign started. McCormick, all they know, they know him a little bit more, because he spent a lot of money running in 2022. But still, a lot of the ads were negative against him. And it's that he's a rich guy from Connecticut, and then you can fill in the rest of it with arguments about who he'd helped, who we'd fight for, how. he's full of shit.

And so I think you'll see with the question is, can Bob Casey turn Dave McCormick into Mitt Romney? And I think the answer to that.

But I did notice that he was on a he's on a podcast right after he started running, where he talked about. one of the most popular beers in Pennsylvania is, of course, is yingling. And he called it yangling. I mean that you you'd.

That's. but so Casey has like a mid to high single digit lead so far. But again, Pennsylvania is a tough state. It's a closed state. It's going to be close between Biden and Trump there.

So go, help, Bob Casey. And of course, if you want to donate in the in the Senate fund, Vote. Save America has a Senate fund that you can go to vote. save america.com and check it out. Before we move on.

Last night was the Pennsylvania primary. You have any thoughts on 155,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania voting for Nikki Haley after she's been out of the race for 50 days?

You know, we've talked about this after every primary, and some of these people voted for Biden 20.

. But just if even a fraction of those people don't vote for Trump, he will lose the state like there is something happening here. And it may even be somewhat related to the absence of protesters in Manhattan. It's just there's something going on that's not getting enough attention. as relates to Trump's coalition.

Every time a single thing happens with Biden, the entire election is viewed through Biden's weaknesses and Trump's strengths. Like how is Trump keeping it all together with all of these felony indictments? Look at all the love for him. And it's like one person tells Nate Cohn that they voted for Biden in 20 and are thinking about voting for someone else now and we throw it away and everyone panics. Trump has a huge problem with his coalition.

Biden also has challenges, but Trump really does. And it keeps showing up in these primaries. It's just. it's not just that they didn't vote for Trump, is that they voted and voted against Trump. They went out and voted.

There was not really a lot of competitive. There were a couple of competitive house races, one on the Republican side, one for the Democratic. incumbent. McCormick wasn't in doubt. And so people went out for the express purpose of voting against Donald Trump.

But I think that's just interesting. It's not an open primary for us.

Oh, wow. I know. I want to hear it. Here. I am.

Just call me Nate. So in the in the twenty twenty general election in Pennsylvania, according to the exit polls, Biden got around two hundred and twenty thousand votes from self-identified Republicans, people who I did as Republicans. But keep in mind, that's a presidential electorate. So a lot more votes than a primary. And, you know, one hundred fifty five thousand Republicans voting for Nikki Haley and not Trump.

Now, again, some of those Republicans will vote for Trump in the general election, for sure. And a lot of them are probably some of these two hundred and twenty thousand Biden voters from twenty twenty. But that's still coming out in a primary, with that's non-competitive to do that. That's, that's something. that's something.

And especially it was heavily her vote was heavily concentrated in a lot of these collar counties around Philadelphia, a lot of the suburbs around there that are going to probably that usually decide Pennsylvania in a general election. So. All right. Before we, before we go, to break, a reminder that if you like to freak out about polls, not me, you've got to check out Dan's subscriber only pod Polar Coaster on the latest episode. You guys looked at why voters rate Trump's presidency more highly now than when it was actually happening, right?

Yeah. Let me let.

who did you talk to on this one? This you may know him. He's on the Zoom call now. Reed.

Huge poll, nerd. That's most important. Be sure to join friends of the pod for access at cricket dot com. slash friends. And on the theme of Dan's wisdom, which we love to talk about here, your motto, Dan, worry about everything, panic about nothing.

The Crooked Store is now stocked with new always worry, never panic. stress balls, key chains and mugs to help you make it through November. Do you get a cut? I guess I'll find.

I guess I should open. I will say, I guess I should open that mug shaped box that came.

Anyway, check them out at Crooked dot com slash store. And also, you know, if you like Pots of America, rate us, write a review. and, you know, tell a friend. We're getting close to election season. We're going to, we're going to need a lot of volunteers, a lot of help to go out there and beat Donald Trump.

So if you're a, if you're enjoying Pots of America, please, you know, tell a friend to go. subscribe when we come back. Dan's interview with George Stephanopoulos.

So that is great. I'm going to get to your fascinating book in a second, but I want to start with this campaign. we're in the middle of. And it sort of pains me to say this, but this is now the third presidential campaign involving Donald Trump within less than a decade that we're all covering. And I'm just curious how you're approaching it.

Are you approaching it differently than in 2016 and 2020? Just where's your mentality right now?

. I think we made some improvements in 2020, but have to do even better in 2024.. I mean, I've probably interviewed Donald Trump, it's been several years now, but I've probably interviewed him about 50 times. And in the 2015-2016 period, 40.. And what I learned through that process is the normal things that reporters, journalists, interviewers do, don't work in this environment.

You know, normally, if you show that somebody's not telling the truth, generally, the politician or the policymaker will stop repeating the lie. That didn't happen in this case. Normally, if you show that someone has been hypocritical, flip-flopped, same thing. And then you combine that with his tendency to simply kind of flood the zone with controversy and falsehoods, it makes it almost impossible to wrap your hands around it. Certainly impossible to play his words.

I mean, one of the biggest things I've learned on my broadcasts, we don't show a lot of Donald Trump because he so often doesn't tell the truth. And I refuse to put on a soundbite. that is not true. You know, that's a good example of what we've learned, 2015-2016.. In 2015-2016, we thought the best practice was kind of a sandwich.

You tell the truth, you show him telling the lie, and you say it was a lie. I don't even think we can do that anymore. I just think we just don't show it. Now, the flip side of that is that there's a danger, when you do that, of sanitizing Donald Trump by only reporting the normal things he says or relatively normal things he says. It makes him look like a normal candidate, which he clearly is not.

And then you brought up a great point a couple of weeks ago in that interview with Hugh Hewitt that Trump had, where he accuses Biden of doing the State of the Union on Coke. The world would have stopped if Joe Biden had said that about Donald Trump or anybody else. We didn't even cover it. Now, I can go both ways on that. I can say it's a mistake not to cover it, and I can say it's a mistake.

And I can also say, well, maybe it's the right thing to do, but it shows the dilemma you're dealing with all the time.

It doesn't have to be a partisan brawl every time. What I won't do in this environment is pretend that someone who is endorsing someone who inspired an insurrection, has been indicted four times, is sitting down in the first criminal trial of a to talk about other things before they address those issues, if they are a supporter of Donald Trump. And what it ends up meaning is that often at this point, and I'm perfectly fine with that, the interviews don't go beyond those issues. Right. This is the Chris Sununu experience of a couple of weeks ago, right?

Precisely, yeah.

I worked with a president who was very prolix as well.

Interviewers are always working against the clock, and politicians and policymakers know that. And so, it's always a tussle over how much you can get in a set amount of time. There's no way it can work with Donald Trump. The only way I would do an interview, and listen, I don't think he's going to do it. He's suing me.

I don't think he's going to do it.

anytime soon. But the only way I would do it is if there was, I would say, at least an hour, and I had full ability to edit it. And would you think about interspersing that with fact checking and stuff like that? Oh, it would be, I mean, it would, I could probably make a two-hour show. At least.

An hour-long interview with Donald Trump that I could edit, but there's no way. I'm just going to allow him to steamroll through an interview. And we've seen examples of this, and I think, I hope everybody's learned the lesson that you. just, that it's bad journalism to do that.

I'm not sure it works. in this case. I mean, you're always up against the clock. The longest a debate would be 90 minutes.

And there's no way, let's face it, there's no way either candidate would abide by the time restrictions. And there's no way you can truly fact check in real time. And I think that it automatically, I think, creates this situation where there's a, I mean, I would say, sort of a false equivalence. I mean, in my mind, and listen, maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I am, but maybe I'm wrong.

In my mind, before you address anything else with this presidential campaign, you have to address the criminal element, not just the trial in New York, but the classified documents case and the January 6th case says, we just learned today that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the state of Michigan for the false elector cases as well. And I was thinking of that as the bulletin came across my email about an hour ago. I can imagine, and we'll see, what happens tomorrow morning, but I was already imagining the debates, and I shouldn't put it in terms of debate. I was already imagining what it would be like to get that in the show tomorrow morning and having some people think, oh, well, what's new about that? What's new is the fact that he's an unindicted co-conspirator.

Again, if this were anybody else at any other time in any other presidential election campaign, that fact alone, which is barely a blip on the radar today, would be massive front page news. And we can't pretend that it's.

In terms of national consequence, this trial in Manhattan is exponentially more important.

Like you, guys are covering it, you're doing the kind of coverage leading the news, but I don't think I've walked into a coffee shop or in the grocery line and heard other people talking about it in the way, I mean, you know, I skipped class to watch the OJ verdict, and that's, you know, and everyone did, right? And this is just, there's just something going on here that is just very, you know, I think part of it's the media environment, part of it's Trump that is advantaging him, I think, in some way through all of this stuff. Although you get to the,

Then, on one of your days off, you host a Sunday show. I go to bed early. What time does your alarm clock go off?

I've thought about it many times. I actually started a book many, many years ago.

Each time, I had an internal standard for myself. I don't want to cast aspersions on any of my colleagues in the journalism world, but one bar for me was that it couldn't be like a potted book, a book that isn't really new, isn't really journalism, just sort of rehashing stuff. Number two, I really wanted to do a book where it felt new and different. It would be a book where I would consider it a good book if I read it. Frankly, I started a book many years ago.

I could tell four chapters in, it was not meeting that standard. I put it aside. In this case, somebody came to me actually and said, how about a book about the Situation Room? Immediately, I thought about it. My second question was, has it been done?

The truth is, there's never been a popular history of the Situation Room. There was one book by a former staffer, a guy named Michael Bone, which came out 20 years ago. When I heard that it really hadn't been done and saw that it could be a window into looking at crisis management in the White House, I immediately said, wow, this is a great idea. I should also add that I'm in the. It Takes a Village.

world of writing a book. I certainly wrote it, but I had a co-writer, Lisa Dickey, and I had a terrific research team, Cameron Peters and Emily Michel. They were just fantastic. Having that whole team being able to work together on it made it very possible. I would work on it every afternoon for one to three hours.

With that team, we were able to get it done in about.

When I got to us, I half expected to see a bust.

You also know from working in the White House that the professional staff in the Situation Room, the detailees from Army, Navy, Air Force, NSA, DIA, Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security, are some of the top professionals in government, rigorously apolitical, so dedicated to serving the White House as the eyes and ears of the White House. They're the funnel for all the communication coming into the White House and a lot of the communication going out of the White House. Such impressive people. It turned out to be, for me, the best part about this book was being able to tell their stories. I interviewed dozens of them, interviewed over 120 people in all.

To hear the stories of these.

detailees, when they come to the White House, it's either the stepping stone to far greater things that they're going to do later in their career or the capstone of an already terrific career in the national security establishment. Being able to tell their stories was just a great treat. Frankly, to go back to the top of our discussion, a wonderful tonic for an antidote to dealing with our current politics. every morning. I was saying this to some friends the other day.

I probably go into GMA, I get there by 3.

50 each morning. Frankly, I start each day a little bit angry, a little bit irritated, a little bit sad about covering politics, because I think it's become so toxic and the stakes are so high. To be able to, in the afternoon, talk to these amazing people and tell their stories gave me a lift. every single day. It turns out.

we've heard a lot about the deep state in the last several years. My insight, after spending the last couple of years on this book, is the deep state is packed with patriots.

I remember looking at my phone and becoming, for the first time, very scared. Next time this phone rings, we have to answer it. It's like, I see David Axelrod walking the hallways and Valerie Jarrett's there. I was like, this, is it. Then, about 30 minutes later, I went down to the White House mess, which is right across from the Situation Room to get a Diet Coke.

The door opens and I see this group of people come out, a couple of them in military uniforms. They seem very serious. They've just left a meeting. I was like, oh, there are adults here.

What you had was both teams working together in those hours between basically 9 and 2 in the afternoon, until it seemed like the threat had passed. I actually got to talk to one Sit Room staffer, one of the professionals, who got to give President Obama the news, got to welcome him into office and give him the news that the threat had receded.

And Ukraine for Biden as well, both. And Ukraine for Biden, exactly. But it's a way to understand how these presidents make decisions in crisis, right? Which is where you really can tell who the president is, what they stand for, their values. What did you learn through those conversations about both Biden and Trump?

that would be relevant to voters heading into this election?

And this was just.

. There were always partisan differences. There were differences of the amount of control the National Security Advisor had, the amount of time a president would spend in the Situation Room. The difference of Donald Trump was the difference between normal and abnormal presidencies. I mean, nothing about the way that Donald Trump handled these crises.

was what anyone would recognize who worked in a Republican or Democratic White House for 40 years in that.

. Actually, now 60-year period as normal. Nothing he did. And it turns out that during the Trump era, the president was the crisis to be managed. And that became the theme of the chapter, how people would maneuver around him, how they would try to set up situations where he would have a little bit less control to do some of the things he thought he could do, like sell Greenland, for example, or trade Greenland for Puerto Rico, some crazy, crazy ideas that were coming out of the Situation Room.

On Biden, it was interesting to me, and you know what lead times of books are like. I actually had turned in this book last September, so it actually ended with the beginning of the war in Ukraine and then an epilogue on the renovation of the Situation Room, which has just been an amazing renovation under Biden. But one of the things I learned from him is how, number one, probably no president in the history of the Situation Room has spent more time in the Situation Room than Joe Biden, because of his eight years as vice president, now four years as president, and he's learned a lot about the process from that. You know that during the Obama administration, he was kind of like the advocate in the Situation Room for President Obama, who would give the president space to make his decisions. In the Biden administration, it seems like Jake Sullivan is, to the extent anybody's playing that role, Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, is playing it.

But one of the things I took away from it is that the Biden team learned, though, from the mistakes that were surrounding the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the insufficient contingency planning, which even the State Department Inspector General said that, and they made sure to put that experience to use as they were preparing for the war in Ukraine.

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