Trump Loses It Over Fox News Poll

This episode dives into the recent reactions of former President Donald Trump to a Fox News poll that unfavorably compared him to Joe Biden, highlighting the tumultuous relationship between Trump and the media he once favored.

1. Trump's strategy involves attacking Biden's cognitive abilities and expecting media bias during debates.
2. Trump remains dismissive of traditional debate preparations, relying on his instinctive style.
3. The episode illustrates the complex relationship between Trump and Fox News, especially when polls do not favor him.
4. The hosts discuss potential impacts of campaign strategies that focus on personal attacks over policy.
5. Bob Bauer's insights provide a behind-the-scenes look at debate preparations and the ethical considerations in politics.

1: Introduction

Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer introduce the episode's themes, focusing on Trump's reaction to Fox News polls and the upcoming debate. Tommy Vietor: "Today we're diving into Trump's explosive reaction to the latest Fox News poll." Dan Pfeiffer: "It's fascinating to see how he's setting the stage for the upcoming debate."

2: Trump's Reaction to the Poll

The hosts discuss Trump's harsh criticism of Fox News following an unfavorable poll, reflecting his volatile relationship with the media. Dan Pfeiffer: "Trump's lashing out shows his discomfort with not controlling the narrative." Tommy Vietor: "He's trying to work the refs before the debate even starts."

3: Debate Strategies

Exploration of Trump's debate strategies, including his refusal to engage in traditional preparation and his focus on attacking Biden's mental fitness. Tommy Vietor: "Trump is really banking on painting Biden as mentally unfit." Dan Pfeiffer: "It's a risky strategy that could backfire if Biden performs well."

4: Guest Segment: Bob Bauer

Bob Bauer discusses his role in simulating Trump for Biden's debate prep and shares insights into the ethical challenges in politics. Bob Bauer: "Preparing Biden for Trump's unpredictability is challenging but essential for honest representation of debate dynamics."

5: Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on the political process, the role of the media, and the ethical considerations in campaigning. Dan Pfeiffer: "This election cycle is testing the boundaries of traditional political engagement." Tommy Vietor: "And it's crucial we discuss the implications of these strategies on our democracy."

1. Stay Informed: Regularly check multiple news sources to get a well-rounded view of political events.
2. Fact-Check Information: Always verify political claims, especially during election seasons, to combat misinformation.
3. Engage Critically: Analyze the motives behind political strategies and media reports to understand the broader implications.
4. Discuss Politics Openly: Engage in respectful conversations to bridge gaps in understanding and perspectives.
5. Participate in Elections: Ensure to vote and encourage others to do the same, emphasizing the importance of every single vote.

Joe Biden heads to Camp David to prepare for next week's debate, Donald Trump bungles the expectations game, and both sides prepare for the post-broadcast clip war. Meanwhile, a new Fox News poll shows Biden ahead, and Trump lashes out at the betrayal. Then, former White House Counsel Bob Bauer stops by to talk about playing Trump in debate prep in 2020, the Supreme Court, and his new book, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis.

People

Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Bob Bauer

Companies

Fox News

Books

"The Unraveling" by Bob Bauer

Guest Name(s):

Bob Bauer

Content Warnings:

None

Tommy Vitor
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Right now, us cellular customers get $1,200.

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Tommy Vitor
Welcome to pod save America. I'm Tommy Vitor.

Dan Pfeiffer
I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Tommy Vitor
Dan, welcome back from vacation. We missed you.

Dan Pfeiffer
I had a great vacation, but I am excited to pod.

Tommy Vitor
Excited to pod. Well, we're excited to have you. On today's show, we got. With one week to go before the debate, Joe Biden heads to Camp David to prep, and Donald Trump can't figure out whether to lower expectations or to raise them. And both sides are planning ahead for the post debate spin, social media slash deceptively edited fake war, whatever it's gonna be. So we'll talk all through that, then we have a lot of new polling to go through, and some of it is actually good for Joe Biden, but not all of it. And then later, former White House counsel Bob Bauer stops by to talk about playing Donald Trump in debate prep for Joe Biden in 2020, the Supreme Court and his new book, the Unraveling, about just how unethical our politics has become. Dan, I had to, I told Bob this. It was interesting that he wrote this, like, sort of long look back about his life and time in politics and came away with his concerns about how unethical it all is, he said. I think of him as, like, one of the more upstanding people we actually got to work with.

Dan Pfeiffer
Oh, absolutely. One of the best, most solid, most serious people you could ever meet with. And very, very funny.

Tommy Vitor
Very, very funny. And apparently was an excellent Donald Trump in 2020. And I got to tell you that I came away, he couldn't comment. But I came away thinking that he's reprising his role as Donald Trump in the 2024 debate prep sessions.

Dan Pfeiffer
And I say this with all love for Bob, but I can't think of a better person to do that.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, he's very true. But first, in our book, democracy, or else comes out on Monday. Look, you have been on the New York Times bestseller list, which is our goal. What do you have to do to get there? Like, who do we grease? And will you make a gigantic bulk purchase on my behalf?

Dan Pfeiffer
I've already made several bulk purchases because I'm competitive. And if you, if I was on the list of you guys made the list, I wanted to have that little dagger that they give for bulk purchases. They always give to Ted Cruz.

Tommy Vitor
Ted Cruz, Don Junior, they all get.

Dan Pfeiffer
The little dagger because the RNC buys them in bulk. The very serious answer here is. Here is how you get on the best sell list. This is the key. You people who are listening to this podcast right now, what they do is they go grab their phone, which they already have, because they're listening to this podcast, and they pre order the book.

You go to crooked.com books to do that. You can do it wherever you get your books, but that is the best way, because every pre order gets dumped into the New York Times bestseller list the moment the book goes on sale. That gives you a huge surge of momentum, which then puts you up the rankings on all the sites, which then gets you more publicity, which gets the book featured more. So we cannot live in a world where this book is not on the New York Times bestsellers and not yet the top of the New York Times bestseller list. So everybody listening, go pre order it right now. It is very simple. You know you're going to buy it eventually, so buy it now. It'll have more impact.

Tommy Vitor
I'm also. I'm excited for our first, just, like, scathing review. I don't know if it's going to come from the left or the right, but it's coming, baby, and it's going.

Dan Pfeiffer
I don't think you're going to get a scathing review. I've read the book. It is. It is great. It is funny. The illustrations are great. You're not getting a scathing review. Hopefully. What you want is you want to enrage someone on the right.

Ben Shapiro and a bunch of other people went nuts over my last book, and it was incredibly helpful. Yes, we're working on that largely because it was called battling the big lie, and it was largely about them, so.

Tommy Vitor
Right. Fair.

Dan Pfeiffer
Mission accomplished on my part.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. You took them on by name. Yeah. We have some plans to engage our friends on the right, but more about that later. Dan, I'm also excited to see you in Boston. You're actually going moderate a book event for democracy else on Thursday, June 27 before the debate. Thank you for that. Also, I'm working on your request to be able to mute Lovett's mic like Jake Tapper and Dan Bash.

Dan Pfeiffer
That's not what I want because a lot of people are calling this a book event. I'm calling a survivor interrogation event.

Tommy Vitor
You can't answer anything.

Dan Pfeiffer
I've talked to some people we know in the CIA.

I have some ways in which we're going to ask the questions that we're going to dupe them into answering it. So just stay tuned, people.

Tommy Vitor
If you're saying we're going to waterboard Lovett, then this trip just got interesting. We also have a book event in New York on Tuesday, June 25. Tickets to both shows include copies of the book. Go to crooked.com events to get your tickets now. And if you're not in the New York or Boston area or you can't make it, go to crooked.com books to pick up a copy of democracy or else you'll enjoy it. We promise. And as you know by now, Crooked Media is going to donate all the proceeds from the book to support vote save America in 2024 candidates. So you are reading for a good cause or just putting something on your shelf for a good cause. Either is fine by me. Our Ben. Let's get to the news. So the first debate of this election cycle between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is going down a week from the day of this recording. Hard to believe that it'll be on Thursday, June 27 at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Joe Biden is finally back from multiple foreign trips. He's heading to Camp David as we speak to prep. He'll be joined there by Ron Klain, the former White House chief of staff and the debate guru for Democrats for like the last 20 years. We don't know yet for sure who's playing Trump in the mock debate sessions. I suspect it might be Bob Bauer, but we'll talk more with Bob in a few minutes. You'll hear all about that. We do know that Biden will be at the podium on the right hand side of the tv screen after the Biden campaign won a football style coin flip. Biden picked tails because as you and I both know, tails never fails.

And Biden's team opted to pick the, their podium position and let the Trump campaign decide whether they wanted to go first or second in closing statements. So Trump is going to go second with his closing statement, which means he has the last word. This is so stupid. I mean, I guess, like, this is the best way. You pick these little minutiae, you flip a coin. But I don't. It seems so silly.

Dan Pfeiffer
I'm curious as to why, like, you obviously have a plan, right? When you go in overtime in football, like, you, you were told by the coach, we're going to defer, we're going to take the kickoff, all of that.

So the Biden people were decided that they were going. If they won the coin toss, their first choice would be podium position. So I'm just very curious as to why that was more valuable to them. His good side, maybe, is that.

Tommy Vitor
That's got to be the thing.

Dan Pfeiffer
Or maybe I more like Donald Trump's bad side.

Oh, I bet Donald Trump cares a lot about what side he's on. And I bet that they think they'll be in his head if he has to have his bad side facing the camera.

Tommy Vitor
Oh, God, I hope that's true. We don't know much about Trump's plans for debate prep. One of his senior advisors recently said that they don't have any because Trump doesn't need to be, quote, programmed by staff. That much is true, sir, we believe you, but you can tell it is on his mind. Here's Trump at a rally in racing, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.

Donald Trump
Is anybody gonna watch the debate?

He's gonna be so pumped up. He's gonna be pumped up. You know, all that stuff that was missing about a month ago from the White House, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine. I wonder who that could have been.

I don't know, actually. I think it was Joe.

But I said, we'll do it. They didn't think I was going to do it. They thought I would say, no, I don't want to do it because CNN is so, you know, it's fake news.

But I think maybe they'll be honest. I think. I think fake Tapper would really help himself. It were honest. But you'll see immediately if it is or not. I'll probably be. Dana Bash is the other. I'll be debating three people instead of one instead of one half of a person.

Tommy Vitor
It's just typically incoherent. Dan, can you lower expectations for your debate opponent when you've been accusing them of dementia for the better part of four years?

Dan Pfeiffer
Probably not. Be my guess. And not just accusing him. There is a pro Trump super PAC ad on the air right now in many of these battleground states that has the accused Joe Biden having dementia. It's the number one most run ad from the, the Trump side, I think, thus far in this race.

What Trump's doing there is bizarre. I mean, in some ways, you can sort of, you know, kind of reverse engineer some sort of strategy to it where he is trying to set up if he does not do well, if, like, hit the, what, the sort of false logic he has here is if Biden does was because he's on cocaine, and if Trump does not do well, it's because everyone is against Trump and it's a rigged system. And he went into it knowing it's right because of fake Tapper and Dana Bash, because they're from CNN and all of that. But it's not, you know, it's just not a fully baked strategy, which I guess is not unusual for Trump. But it's just he's kind of all over the map and he's mostly doing the cocaine. Biden on cocaine is a real, it's a real zinger that the Trump rally people love. And I think it's why he's going with that more than some sort of, some, some debate strategy, per se.

Yeah.

Tommy Vitor
I mean, all of this sort of debate expectations management, it feels like a thing from the before times to me because I can remember in 2004, the Bush campaign was out in advance of their first debate, saying that John Kerry was the best debater to ever run for president and better than Cicero. And the way the kind of game worked at the time was the press gobbled that stuff up and they were like, oh, what a great line. And they kind of, like, reported it at face value. But now, I mean, it was obviously nonsense then. It's nonsense now, like, to accuse Joe Biden of doing cocaine. But you're right. I mean, it's just kind of incoherent. And I guess the crowd likes it.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, it's, I don't think the debate expectation thing ever really mattered that much. Like, the press is not stupid. Right? They know who these people are. They're not. No one ever believed that John Kerry was the best political debater since Cicero. Like, there was no, like, based on what that was from, like, I was thinking back to Obama's first debate against McCain, which we're very, very nervous about. He, you know, untested on the, on the national stage.

Huge questions about experience, where if he were to fumble on that debate. It could change the whole race. And so we spent all this time talking, like, really downplaying Obama's communication skills, which seems absurd, right, since how he rose to prominence was through communications. But we were reminding people about how, what a terrible job he did in all the primary debates, how he. It. Like one of the lines used to say, because I think it was 90 seconds, was the debate. The answer increments in that first debate, we'd say, what takes Obama 90 seconds to clear his throat before he could get to an answer? Because he is famously long winded. Then we spent all this time just selling people on the idea that McCain had all this debate experience from floor debates in the Senate, which are just dueling speeches, right? It's like dueling banjos of oratory. It's not an actual debate, but we all try. Cause it's kind of what? Like, you're just. Everyone's just playing a role in a play, right, in the run up to.

Tommy Vitor
Debate, and nothing you do matter. It is so funny to call up a bunch of reporters and be like, hey, man, on deep background, do you know how much my boss sucks?

Dan Pfeiffer
That's right. Look, man, we are nervous.

I gotta see that other guy whose ass were kicking in the polls, who, you know, but he's incredible. You know, it's the same. It was like, it was like the Bush Carrey thing was the same thing. It's like every other thing they ever said about Kerry was that he was a weak loser. And they're like. But on the debate stage, whoa, watch out, guys.

Tommy Vitor
Big man. Yeah, I think you're exactly right, though. It's safe to say that unless Biden just totally bombs, Trump is going to blame the moderators and then go back to this line that he was on drugs. Now, when I first got a job working for President Obama, then state Senator Obama, my boss, Robert Gibbs, who went on to be the White House press secretary, said, the first rule of spin is that it has to be believable.

Accusing Joe Biden of taking debate peds doesn't seem believable to me, but I don't know, it's become an article of faith in conservative circles. Do you think you have to push.

Dan Pfeiffer
Back at that point? No, I don't think you have to push back at that.

I've argued this in every form I have that the press should cover Trump more aggressively when he accuses the sitting president. States of doing cocaine. Like, that's in a pre Trump world. That would be the biggest story in american politics. For six straight weeks. Yeah, but what is, what the cocaine peds thing is, it is a way for Republicans to resolve the cognitive dissonance between the Joe Biden that exists within the MAGA media ecosystem and in their heads, who has dementia, incognito decline, is a puppet, can't stay awake, doesn't know what inflation is. That's a, that's a common Trump line. And the Joe Biden who appeared at the state of the union. Right, like those two, you can't have both of those things in your head without concocting some sort of story to explain them. And so they have landed on this. And it is like, yes, for the vast majority of the electorate, spin must be believable. And for the tradition, you know, for the mainstream press, who used to matter so much, who were the narrators of the campaign, spin had to be believable. But if for your, in this media environment, with your hardcore base, particularly on the right, who exists in this hermetically sealed media ecosystem, doesn't have to be believable, it just has to be enjoyable. Right, and that's what that is.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's funny to think back in 2007, uh, Billy Shaheen, who is then Clinton's New Hampshire campaign co chair, raised Barack Obama's youthful cocaine use and then had to resign from the campaign because it was a huge scandal that backfired on them. So you're right. We've come a long way from that to a place where the former president accuses the current president of doing cocaine before the state of the union. But I digress, Dan. So one of the emerging battlegrounds in the race is these so called cheap fake videos. Those are different than deepfakes, which are made with AI generated imagery. A cheap fake is the cool new term for an old concept, which is using genuine footage, but editing it in a deceptive way. One example of a cheap fake was this recent video of Biden and other world leaders at the g seven last week. They were watching a skydiving demonstration, and at 1.1 of the parachutists landed kind of out of frame. Biden walks over, gives them a thumbs up, he's talking to them, and then people, including the New York Post, edited that video to take out the skydivers and make it look like Biden just kind of wandered off and had to be brought back into the group for a photo. All of this is to say, the Biden campaign is reportedly more concerned about how moments from the debate will get clipped out and shared on social media than the debate itself as sort of a single event. Dan, I know that folks I used to talk to who worked on Al Gore's 2000 campaign felt like they won some of the debates against Bush in the moment, but lost the spin war afterwards.

Do you think that spin war is even more important now that we are living in this social media era?

Dan Pfeiffer
I was one of the people who worked on that campaign, Tommy, because I'm old, and that is mostly true. I mean, I've gone back and watched those debates over the years and. Which is not as exciting statement of my life. And Gore did poorly. He didn't win those debates in the moment either. But there was this famous thing where it's just so different how debates were is that all the press who were covering it were in one room to watch it on a big screen as they typed away on their overly large laptops or wrote in hand to then call into the, dictate it to the desk, which is wild. And they had the, in the first debate, they had the closed circuit feed from inside the room, which was only the mic of the person speaking.

But if you were watching it on television, you would, you had a different feed and you heard Gore sighing. Cause Gore's mic was live the whole time. You heard him sighing every time Bush said something in a very exasperated, annoying way. And so the reporters walked out of the room thinking Gore had done fine.

But then when they got to the spin room, they discovered in part from the Bush command, but also because the entire nation heard it, that Gore had been sighing the whole time. And that was, that was bad for it. Now, in this case, what is, there are two things that have changed a lot in debate since then. One is now you spin during the debate, like back in the day, you know, like in the, in the, we worked in the bombing campaign, we would email out fact checks to reporters who would never open their. Why would they stop watching?

Tommy Vitor
You get like 150 of them.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yes, come in. They're flying in. Every group is sending them and no one's ever reading. It's just like a gigantic busy work project for researchers and writers.

But then Twitter happened, right? And then all of a sudden, the reporters who were watching the speech were also following Twitter. That's partially why Obama did so poorly in the 2012 1st debate, because people were watching the reactions of Obama supporters online during the debate.

And like famously, Andrew Sullivan, the conservative columnist who was an Obama supporter, basically melted down on Twitter about how bad Obama was. Chris Matthews melted down on television. People saw that Ben Smith, who was then at Buzzfeed, declared Romney the winner, like, nine minutes into the debate, which became a thing. And so the spin room doesn't really matter anymore. There will still people go into a room and they'll have interns behind them with giant signs with their name. I still have my giant sign from the first debate, the first Obama became debate with my name on it hanging in my house because it was very cool. But does it does not matter anymore.

There will be online spin, but what will matter the most is, and this, what the Biden people are rightly worried about is, you know, maybe 50 million people watch this debate. You know, so that is a third of the electorate, and it's, and that third of the electorates watching is going to be disproportionate people who've already made up their mind. And so how people were confronted will be clips shared on tick tock and social. And are those clips can be favorable to Biden or unfavorable to Biden? And that is deeply concerning. And it's less, this will be less cheap fakes than just out of context quick moment. Right? Like, everyone's going to have the same video feed. So I don't think you're going to be able to, like, make it seem like Biden wandered off.

Tommy Vitor
Right.

Dan Pfeiffer
But you will. You will if, you know, they will be. You know, you can see a supercut of moments where Biden stutter comes forward, which will make it seem like he was not in it, you know, like on his game for the debate, when he actually was, or a moment where he, as he did in that one press conference where he said, the president of Mexico, when he met the president of Egypt. Um, you know, so there could be moments like that that could be, uh, then driven with the algorithms on Twitter, with, sorry, with the algorithms on TikTok, particularly to make people who didn't watch the debate feel worse about his performance.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I mean, there will just be kind of an arms race where everyone is getting their video editors together to try to tell a story from 90 minutes of debate. It could be, you know, Biden stutter, like you said. That could be a negative one for Biden, or it could just be like, Trump's angry and incoherent again. Remember this guy? This is what you hated about the first debate back in 2020 when the two candidates interrupted each other something like 76 times. That is kind of a discrete challenge around this debate itself. But on this cheap fakes issue, I mean, the Biden campaign does seem incredibly frustrated with the proliferation of misleadingly edited videos of him. I, like, feel their pain in some sense. Like when the New York Post takes a video directly from the RNC and kind of makes it even worse looking and then posts it as their own. Like, that is out of bounds for a media gathering organization that ostensibly, you know, claims to be just, you know, a news company and not an opinion company. But it does seem like at the end of the day, like there's going to be one of these cheap, fake type videos every single day from now until the end of the election. There's almost nothing you can do about it except make a bunch of your own stuff, right? And, like, kind of fight fire with fire, either by putting out videos of Trump where, you know, you're highlighting some sort of weakness of his, or you're just putting out stuff where Biden looks sharp and on top of things and that vision of him gets to someone in their algorithm in the same way that the video of him looking, you know, lost to the g seven does.

Dan Pfeiffer
This is, I mean, this is very challenging for the Biden folks for a host of reasons. Like they're at an algorithmic disadvantage, right? Positive Biden clips don't trend on tick tock like negative Biden clips for a whole host of reasons, which then creates a disincentive for people to put out positive Biden clips because you're not getting engagement.

What I think there are a couple thoughts around this. One is these clips don't exist in a vacuum. They only matter if they dovetail with the larger conversation that's happening. Right, where there's like, everything happens in surround sound now, right? So you see this and you are kind of hearing other things. And if so, and if Biden does well in the debate, and the takeaway is in the conversation about the debate is Biden did well, he beat expectations, then those clips are not going to make sense in the context of that larger conversation.

More broadly, you're like, there is an Ella whack a mole element to all of these things, right? Where it's every day they're coming out, they're going there. You know, the Biden folks are going after the New York Post. They're sending out 7000 tweets about it. They're angry about it, they're trying to stop it. You, and you do want to respond to the ones that you can with as much force as you can. But ultimately, the way to combat it is, is that the president has to be omnipresent in the media. There has to be, he has to be doing things all the time, people to be seeing him. Those things have to be the sort of things that break through. Like, one example, and I understand why they didn't do this, but I think you have to lean your mentality towards viral content that'll be positive for your side.

You know, the president went home between the Normandy ceremony and the G. Where we at the eight? G eight. G seven.

Joe Biden
Which.

Dan Pfeiffer
I mean.

Tommy Vitor
G seven. G seven.

Dan Pfeiffer
G seven.

Tommy Vitor
G seven.

Dan Pfeiffer
We're at the G seven.

Tommy Vitor
We kick those Russians out.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, but had he stayed in Europe, he could have gone to the Phillies game in London.

Phillies were playing. Like, that's the thing where he goes to that. He's. That's a big viral moment. Like, you have to find more macro viral moments just be everywhere right now. My hope and expectation is that the president be out campaigning just about every day after this first debate, and then you will have the opportunity to push back with those positive moments, but now those. Because he is out there less or not that he's out there less. He's doing stuff all the time. He's a very. He's much busier than Trump. It's just he has to do a lot of presidential things that don't really break through in the same way that campaigning, political stuff do, where you're creating the conflict by going after your opponent or getting out of the White House and hopefully be able to do more of that going forward. But the only way around is through, and it is with doing as much stuff as you possibly can. You're not gonna beat these one by one.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I mean, trump getting to go to, like, ultimate fighting competitions and hang out with Dana White and get cheered by a crowd is a lot more fun and a lot more viral than attending the G seven. What is our.

Dan Pfeiffer
What is the democratic equivalent of going to the.

A UFC event?

Tommy Vitor
I don't know. I tried to ask Adisu about this. I mean, during the Obama era, it was probably going to the NBA Finals or something like that, but I'm not entirely sure what.

Dan Pfeiffer
It's a pod safe America show in Brooklyn. My friend.

Tommy Vitor
Joe Biden's better than that. Don't ever say that about him. Last thing on debate, Stan. I came across this report from a group called open to debate. They're out of Princeton University. They had a bunch of researchers watch every single debate from the last 20 years a bunch of times, poor bastards. And came to some conclusions, including that the debates have gotten worse and worse. They've gotten more confrontational, they've gotten less substantive, the main recommendations they came up with are that the moderators should be more empowered to interrupt and stop candidates from deflecting or refusing to answer questions. They also called for more expertise. They liked the idea and called for it as well, of the ability to mute mics when candidates aren't talking, which is going to be in place for these debates at the Biden camp's insistence. Dan, I mean, were the debates always bad, in your opinion, or do you think they've gotten worse?

Dan Pfeiffer
The report is so funny to me because they watched every debate of the last 20 years. So that's five presidential elections times three debates plus one vice presidential.

Tommy Vitor
I wonder if it was primary ones.

Dan Pfeiffer
Maybe they watched. If they watched primary ones, then God bless them, because there were hundreds of those. But if it was just the presidential general election ones, then you watched 20 debates. Congratulations. The other thing that's funny is they're like, things have gotten so much worse. We're not really sure why. Starting in 2016, like, all of them are like, there was one personal attack until 2016, and then starting in 2016, there have been 76 of them. And it's like, there was very little interruption. And then in 2016, there was so many more eruptions. It's like, I wonder what changed in presidential politics in 2016. Yeah. Could it something do with Donald Trump arriving?

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I think that's right.

Dan Pfeiffer
I think debates have always been stupid. It is important to have a moment where people will tune into the campaign and see the candidates, but they. A debate performance under any format, like traditional Lincoln Douglas, like socratic method debates, the way we've been doing them, town hall, all of those are terrible proxies for what kind of president you would be, right?

Tommy Vitor
That's the funny thing about being president. You never debating has become this key part of how we select a president. But you never actually debate anyone as president.

People stand up and salute you when you walk in the room. They kiss your ass. They don't push back on you. Completely divorced from the reality of the job.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I mean, like, it is fine, but we shouldn't pretend that someone being good at debates means they'll be good at precedent. Far from it, actually.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I mean, I think the question really is whether this debate is going to matter. Obviously, it's impossible to know. I mean, my instinct is that this one will matter a lot for Joe Biden because it's an opportunity to show that attacks about his age are wrong. I also think it'll matter for Trump because, you know, he has a chance now to prove to voters that he is less of a ranting, raving lunatic than he was the last time they saw him debate. But at the same time, I mean, it's happening in June, and the odds of us remembering what they even talked about come November seems pretty low. But, I mean, where do you land on, like, the does this debate matter question?

Dan Pfeiffer
This will be, in my estimations, likely the most impactful moment of the campaign to date and massively throughout the whole campaign, and probably more impactful than either of the convention speeches. Um, obviously, a second debate in September should matter more than a first debate in June. There is one giant, looming question about Joe Biden is, and it comes up in every poll, every focus group, every conversation you have with a voter in your life is, is he too old?

And this is his first, best opportunity because people, because of changes in the media environment, because of sort of how he is as a communicator, people don't see Joe Biden speak ever.

Right? And so this is a moment to do this. And one of the few things that actually break through in american life these days is big events, right?

Tommy Vitor
It's like ones too, right?

Dan Pfeiffer
Big live events where people will get together, tune in, talk about it simultaneously on social media, post clips about it afterwards. And so this is a huge moment, right? And when I had Sarah Longwell on the podcast last week, she would made the point that doesn't really matter what Joe Biden says. It matters how he says it, right? Donald Trump's on that stage, but Joe Biden is actually just debating the caricature of himself portrayed by Republicans. And can he beat that? Right? Can he beat it by enough that voters will say, I trust him? Because I have come sort of to the conclusion that, and we're going to talk about polling in a minute. But Biden's age is infecting all of the polling. Right? It's one of the reasons why we're like, why don't people trust him on these issues? Because he think he's too old, right? And so if you can address the age thing, you will address the polling, the economy, polling on immigration, polling on strength, all of those things. And this is a great opportunity to do it. It's a, it's high stakes. I mean, it's not gonna be easy with Trump acting like a lunatic on stage, but this is the best chance to do it. And you know how you have to imagine a lot of people will be watching.

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Tommy Vitor
Let's turn to the polling, though, Dan, because we have a rule around here that we don't focus too much on the results of any one poll, but we are willing to relax that rule when the poll causes Donald Trump to have a series of public meltdowns. So that's what we got in a Fox News poll released on Wednesday. So this latest Fox News poll, it shows Biden up two in the national head to head. Last month, he was down one point and he hasn't led since October. It's a pretty big change in this poll when the third party candidates are added in, Biden's lead is only one point. But very little gets Trump angrier than when Fox appears to betray him. And he has taken the opportunity to trash Fox and he's blaming his imaginary enemy, Paul Ryan, who is on Fox's corporate board of directors. So this is one of his posts from truth social. Today, Trump said, nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I'm one of them. With the weak, ineffective rhino, Paul Ryan on its board of directors, he's a total lightweight, a failed, empathetic speaker of the House and a very disloyal person. Romney was bad, but Paul Ryan made him look worse. As a team, they never had a chance. Rupert and Lachlan, get that dog off your board. You don't need him. All you need is Trump. Make America great again. Very thoughtful, coherent truth there. He later wrote another truth post calling the poll trash in capital letters and saying it uses an intentionally pro Biden sample, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, Dan, I know this is hard for you, because on the one hand, you want Joe Biden to win, but on the other, you agree that Paul Ryan is a lightweight and failed, empathetic speaker of the House.

But who are you siding with here?

Dan Pfeiffer
Speaker one well, I'm not signing with Trump, to be very clear, because there's not a chance that Paul Ryan would ever be effective enough to influence anything. Like his entire life is just being a revolving door of failure. So I don't imagine that he is.

All of a sudden he's in there, like, rigging the polls for Donald Trump, so or no. So I don't think that's happening. I mean, this poll is very interesting on a whole host of fronts. Um, as always, we take every individual poll with a grain of salt. A poll that has bind up a couple points is the same as the poll that has bind down a couple points because of margin of error. But what is interesting about this one is a fox is a high quality pollster. I know that seems impossible to imagine, but they have a polling unit with a record of integrity and accuracy. There are a plus, either a or a plus. Polls from 538 can remember which, but top, top ranked pollster.

This poll has Biden's deficit on the economy in the single digits. Right, which is as close as it's been against Trump in a very long time. And to put that in perspective, the New York Times had it at more than 20 points in their poll back in May. And so if that is the case, and we see, we've also seen there's also narrowing on immigration in this poll and a few other issues. If that's the case. What that says is that the sustained advertising the Biden campaign has been doing over the last several months here, while the Trump campaign has not really been on the air, other than in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and some in spurts Biden made and pro Biden's minds are massively outspending, is that that is beginning to affect the electorate. People are beginning to pick that message up. And there you see some movement for Biden. It also comports, even though we're not going to take this poll overly seriously, even if it's enjoyable, to do so, is it does comport with the movement we've seen in the polls since the conviction, which has Biden picking up a few points. Right. A few points here and there, and that is enough to push him in the lead in some of these national polls.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, I mean, I think this poll has been winning independence by nine points. In May, they were with Trump by two points. Biden's now winning double haters by eleven in a two way race. And you're right on these economic numbers. They're improving sort of across the range of questions that were asked. So 32% say the economy is in excellent or good shape. That's not a great number, but it's up to, from maybe 59% say they're getting ahead or holding steady financially. That's up five from last summer. 44% feel optimistic about the economy. That's up nine points from 2023. Biden has 41% approval on the economy. That's not great, but it's his highest in two years. And then Biden's approval is 45 favorable, 55 unfavorable, which again, is underwater and not great. But basically everyone is significantly underwater in this poll. The only person I think who is break even was Jill Biden, who is at like 46 46. So Biden's also winning with voters who are asked which candidate cares about people like you by 51 to 45. That's a good sign. But he's losing the question of who is a strong leader by 43 to 53. So you can see where he has a lot of work to do.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I mean, we should. It's just always worth remembering that Biden won the popular vote by four points last time and won the electoral college by 40,000 votes over three states. So you have, yeah, there is a gap there that you're going to have a slight lead in the national polls is good, but it's not the same thing as winning, which is why most of the models still have Trump as a slight, at least a slight favor, because his battle we have not seen, and this is also what's interesting is we have not seen the numbers in the battleground states move in the same way the national polls have move, which is the reverse of how you would imagine it to be because the ads are running in the battleground states. So normally in past elections, the national polls are a lagging indicator here they're moving faster than the battleground polls. And I'm very curious as to why that is.

Tommy Vitor
Wonder if it's good. Democrats are coming home.

Biden is finally leading the fivethirtyeight national average for the first time. I think in this year, he's up by two tenths of a point. Now. Again, that's not a lot, but it's not only an average, it's sort of a trend of the averages. So I don't know, do you think this is still just not statistically significant, Dan, or are you watching these trends and feeling better broadly?

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I feel better broadly. Right. I mean, you're, you have seen post conviction, some gains for Biden and some gains is good. There is more work to do. But it is, it is a positive side. Right. The debate is going to matter more than anything else. Right. If Biden has a good debate, that's going to help. If he has a bad debate, that's going to hurt a lot. But what we have seen, slight movement towards Biden since the conviction, will that stay?

Maybe. You know, we have a long time in the election.

We also know that a lot of the voters who could be persuaded by Trump's conviction to vote against Trump have not really tuned in yet. So you might, we may even not be, have fully realized the impact of the conviction yet, but it tells me that the conviction had an impact in this race. I think that's just an important data point as we think about how this will play out. It is important data point for the Biden campaign strategy going forward, which is why I think they put up that ad that you guys talked about on Tuesday.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. It's also important rejoinder to all the people who saw the guilty verdict come in and said, this just sealed the election for Donald Trump, blah, blah, blah.

Dan Pfeiffer
Those people should not be talking about politics for a living.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. A couple other pieces of polling news over the last couple of days. Just worth mentioning, Dan, these were less rosy for Biden, especially some of the specific groups he really needs to win. So there were some new results from Ecchi's research, which is basically a consortium studying the latino vote in America. They found that on immigration, specifically, Latinos trust Trump more than Biden, though the margin there is much narrower than what they saw with non hispanic voters. The good news is that talking about immigration solutions seems to be effective in moving people to the Biden camp. After looking at the data, eckies concluded that Biden should emphasize keeping families together, that he should keep the focus on immigrant communities that are deeply embedded in the country. So it was interesting research and recommendations there. And then separately, the New York Times did a meta analysis of public polls from the cycle to see what they could conclude about Biden and Trump support among women. They found that Biden's lead with women has dropped from 13% in 2020% to 8% today, and that the losses are most pronounced among non white women. They found that inflation is the most important issue with women voters, the same as it is generally across the board, but that abortion and democracy could be key.

So, Dan, a lot of information there, but were there any key takeaways from any of those surveys for you?

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I thought the Ecky survey was fascinating, and it really did point to how Democrats should be talking about immigration going forward.

What I think happened in the wake of how the Republicans focus on the border, the cynical stunts of sending migrants to democratic cities, the reaction to that is that we focused as a party so much on border security. Right. We tried to out tough Republicans on the border without talking about the broader immigration picture. That's why I thought it was very important that Biden made this announcement earlier this week about helping find legal status for people who aren't documented but are married to american citizens.

There is a message here, and it comes through in the ECCHI's poll, is we can work to keep american families together, that we can be humane and decent and find a less chaotic immigration system for the people who've been in this country, who are embedded in our communities while still keeping the border secure and stopping there from being chaos at the border. Right. That, that is, lo and behold, the message that was at the core of the Democratic Party on immigration for a decade, and we have lost it over the last six months. And I understand why the Biden folks sequenced these announcements, the border of security, executive order and this one in the way they did. A lot of it probably had to do with the timing of when it was, they were done because these, you have to sort of really legal proof these things. But now that both of them are out there, you have to, I think, tell the broader story about both. Right. And still to this day, even though support for conference immigration reform is down from where it was, you know, five, six, seven years ago, that is still what people want. They want a comprehensive system that has border security but also a pathway to citizenship for the people who have been in this country for a long time. We have to pay fines. You have to, you have to wait, wait your turn. But a, a pathway because it's too chaotic right now. Um, and I think a message that sort of gets, you know, gets back at the old hits the Democrats had on immigration, it would be a very positive thing.

And this, this poll very, makes that very clear that it's with the broader lecture but also with the very specific hispanic voters that Biden is losing from 2020.

Tommy Vitor
I think you're right. And I'm just glad that Ecky's highlighted the sense of, like, humanity, indecency and the need to keep families together because that has gotten just completely lost from the conversation. It's all about border security. And you're right. I mean, like when, when the Trump administration was separating families, that was really one of the nadirs of the entire presidency. And I think reminding people of those facts and talking about human beings and just trying to keep people together and not rip people apart from their loved ones is really important. Last question on this, Dan. Just big picture. We get bombarded with so much survey data. Some of it is national polls, some of it is about specific cohorts of voters. When you were working on the campaign or in the White House, and you were taking in all this data and all the private data. How did you keep it from making you kind of lurch from message to message in a way that could be incoherent or just kind of like getting overwhelmed by the deluge, because you can find ways to slice and dice messages to reach out to specific groups, but that can take away from sort of the broader message you're trying to put forward to the american people.

Dan Pfeiffer
You need to have an overall theory of the case, right? That is your argument for why your can't be reflected.

This is such an outdated, antiquated concept.

But my subsec newsletter, the message box, is named after a very specific exercise that used to be done at the beginning of every campaign, where you write a quadrant on a whiteboard and then on one side, you write your campaign's message about yourself. What are you going to say about why you should vote for me? Then you write what you believe your opponent's message is about themselves, right? Like, what are they saying? What are they saying? Their eyes, about why they should be voted for. And then you write your message about your opponent, why not your opponent? Then you write your opponent's why not message about you. And from that exercise, you develop a theory, an overall narrative about why your candidate. And you have to come up with that before you ever do a bunch of polling, right? That is change you can believe in, right? That is the Obama, that's how Obama came up with it, right? It is Bill Clinton's. It's the economy, stupid. Healthcare change is more changed, better, more in the same whatever was on the sort of infamous carvel post it note. You do that and then you don't look at all those polls as a way to tell you what to say, right? You look at those polls to tell you how people are interpreting what you're saying, right? And you make tweaks to it. But you can see democrats have been, it's not really just the Biden folks. It's all across the map, is that we have been flummoxed by the polls because we don't under like it is. We're losing voters we didn't think we would lose ever, right?

Young voters, black voters, hispanic voters. And so we are like ping ponging back from message to message, right? Like one day it's inflation, we're doing inflation, then it's, oh, it's border security. So we're doing a border security thing. And then Donald Trump's a convict. And then Donald Trump is for himself. But also he has dementia, too. And we've been in this way in this sort of mold, really since 2016 with Trump, is you should start with the narrative and then use the data to help you understand the narrative. And we're using the data to tell us what to say. And that, that never works.

Tommy Vitor
No, that's a recipe for incoherence. One last thing before we go to break, Dan. There's been a bunch of bad news for Robert F. Kennedy junior s campaign lately. So the first piece is he has officially been ruled out of next week's CNN debate because he is not yet on the ballot in enough states to actually win. He probably will end up on all the ballots in those states, but he has not gotten there yet. And he also hasn't reached the polling threshold, which is a problem that didn't get any better with the release of this most recent Fox News poll, which found that Kennedy support has been ticking downward month over month, and critically, that his favorability rating has gone from plus three to negative eleven, which is not good in a two way race. It seems like Kennedy supporters split evenly to Biden and Trump. So it's still not entirely clear what his impact is on this race. Kennedy put out a statement about the debate decision, calling it undemocratic, un american and cowardly. He has another problem, though, which is fundraising. According to a report in Politico, Kennedy's campaign spent more than double what it raised in May, and his total cash on hand is now falling. It's just north of $6 million. It is important to note that his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is a billionaire and she can give the campaign as much money as she wants to give it. But she gave a campaign about $8 million in April, but nothing in May. So interesting to note, Dan. It's not clear to anyone, I don't think, maybe not even Robert F. Kennedy Junior, what his goal is here.

It could be stroking a giant ego. It could be him trying to just generally raise awareness about his anti vaccine views. It could be that he's a spoiler for Trump or just really hates Joe Biden. Either way, it's not going great for him. Do you feel like we've seen Peak RFK in this election cycle?

Dan Pfeiffer
Not yet. I think typically third party candidate numbers go down as you close to the election. Right? Is there sort of this, you go from undecided to third party to an actual to one of the two party candidates or you, you know, we saw this in some of the New York Times Sienna polling, polling after the Trump conviction is, you had people go Trump then make a way station at RFK Junior, and then they end up in Biden. Right. And so this is usually a time where the third party candidates are at their peak.

However, this race, you know, if Kennedy were to tap Nicole Shanahan's money for broad based advertising, he could raise his numbers.

Right. He sort of maxed out the right wing MAGA adjacent podcast circuit. Right. Like, I saw him on the kill Tony. I saw a clip of him on the Kill Tony Comedy podcast, which just. He's everywhere. Podcast world, right? Just everywhere. But there's only so much you can't. You're not going to reach the broadest swathe electorate that way. So are they going to run real ads, right, and are going to run them in battleground states?

Will he ever get the 15% to get on the debate stage?

That, I mean, that would be a tremendous performance. Not nothing we've seen since Ross Perot to do that. But can he get. He will likely get on the ballot enough states to get there. So, you know, hard to say. And you just have so many double haters that, like, what if this debate is one of those moments which is very possible, where we all walk away from being like, holy fuck, that was terrible.

Right. And if you're a double hater or someone who's really not into politics, that may push you to Kennedy. So, you know, we'll see, I think is the way I would take it.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Someone named Kennedy might feel like a safe place to park your vote. The other thing for Kennedy that's been challenging is, you know, he came in. I think everyone just assumed he was coming in to be a spoiler for Trump or to at least just go after Biden. But then quickly, the Trump folks started to view him as a threat. I think his welcome became a little less friendly on some of these right wing shows. Right. You have kind of like TP USA conservative group types targeting Kennedy and going after him instead of trying to prop him up anymore. It is kind of funny that Nicole Shanahan is slowly realizing that this very expensive vanity project that she's engaged in is basically just getting her, like, press scrutiny that she probably doesn't want, including about her personal life. So that probably isn't very fun for her. But, I mean, last question on this. Are there any third party candidates that worry you more than Kennedy?

Dan Pfeiffer
No, they actually all worried me about the same.

There was a USA Today Suffolk poll from some of the battleground states, including Michigan, that looked just black voters.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah.

Dan Pfeiffer
And Cornel west does surprisingly well, right? He's getting enough points to be problematic. Jill Stein is on the ballot in some very alarming states like Wisconsin. She gets a couple points that matters, right? So they're all where, every single one of them is worrisome to me. Kennedy's probably the most worrisome because we have seen polling that shows he has a particular appeal among latino voters, and that could be obviously devastating in Nevada, Arizona and elsewhere.

But all concerning worry, worry. I worry about them all.

Tommy Vitor
Wonderful. Me too. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, but we come back. You're going to hear my interview with former White House counsel Bob Bauer. We talk all about his role in 2020 playing Donald Trump during these mock debate prep sessions with Joe Biden. It's a fascinating look into how debate prep works, what it's like to get into the character of Donald Trump, and much, much more. So stick around for that.

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Dressing blessing.

Dan Pfeiffer
Oh, french dressing.

Tommy Vitor
Exactly.

Dan Pfeiffer
Oh, that's good.

Tommy Vitor
I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my new podcast, the puzzler. Something about Mary Poppins.

Dan Pfeiffer
Exactly.

Tommy Vitor
This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to the puzzler every day on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My guest today is the former White House counsel for President Obama, President Biden's personal attorney, and the author of the new book the Unraveling reflections on politics without ethics and democracy in crisis. Bob Bauer. Great to see you.

Donald Trump
Good to see you, Tommy.

Tommy Vitor
Bob, it's great to see you again.

One of my favorite people to work with both on the campaign and in the White House. And there's a lot to talk about in this book. But we have this debate coming up, and you write about the debate preparations that I wanted to start there. Donald TrUmp, Joe Biden are debating in less than a week. Somehow you write about preparing candidates for debates, including President Biden in 2020. You actually played Donald Trump in President Biden's mock debate sessions. How did you prepare for that role? Did you have to go full method like Leonardo DiCaprio and the revenant. Was there a scaled back version? How does this work?

Donald Trump
So when you do debate prep, and I've done it for other candidates, you try to give them as much of the experience that you project they're going to have with the arguments and the way the arguments are going to be made and the tone that's going to be used. But you're not doing an SNL impression. I mean, it's not theatrics because that's just a distraction. And you're trying to help the candidate prepare, not sort of boost your prospects for being invited to host a comedy show. And so the first order of business is to get that right. And that requires you to immerse yourself in just material, audio material, video material, written material, everything going years back that you can find about that candidate that will help you approximate the style and the arguments likely to be made for the candidate you're representing and trying to help prepare.

Tommy Vitor
Now, you also played Bernie Sanders in 2020.

Donald Trump
I did.

Tommy Vitor
In the primary. You were like Merrill streep of debate prep. How do you get that range?

Donald Trump
Well, I don't know.

I enjoyed doing it, but it's really an assignment that you get and you take it. I could have been assigned another democratic primary opponent, and I was assigned Bernie Sanders, so I did it.

Tommy Vitor
I love it. Any chance you're hopping off this zoom and heading up to Camp David to reprise your role?

Donald Trump
I can't answer a question like that. I like that.

I very much respect the fact that you asked it.

Tommy Vitor
That is a wonderfully pregnant, no comment, everybody. Okay. You and I both remember well the first debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012. It went quite badly for President Obama. There was a full on meltdown among progressives afterwards. And one of the reasons why President Obama didn't do well is because incumbent presidents get rusty. You are used to having people stand up and salute when you walk into a room. Staffers who used to push back on you maybe don't when you are the commander in chief. Donald Trump will not hesitate to attack President Biden, sometimes in vicious ways. He will not hesitate to raise personal matters like Hunter Biden's legal issues in debate prep sessions. I mean, does the team go there and sort of prepare candidates to hear what can be very painful personal insults so that you have that experience kind of live in practice or response?

Donald Trump
They have to. I mean, they have to. It wouldn't be a debate prep unless you were thinking through what, on some reasonable basis, recent history, what you've seen out there on the campaign trail, what is my candidate going to face? What sort of arguments are going to be made? In what way?

Approximating, as I said, the tone as much as you possibly can, the style as much as you possibly can. But if you were for some reason to short that, if you were just not to do that, I don't know, out of some misplaced deference or anxiety, then you would really be ill serving your candidate because that's going to happen, or so you think. And therefore that candidate, your candidate has to be prepared for it.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, that's got to be really hard, right? Because look, if you're at the debate prep, I mean, you have a relationship with this candidate on a human level, saying something about someone's son or daughter to them, whether or not you're kind of playing a role feels wrong. I mean, is that tough to get through?

Donald Trump
I found in debate prep, everybody walks in knowing perfectly well it may be uncomfortable, but that's your job. It's what you have to do. And I don't think it's taken personally. I mean, do you love having to do that? I mean, take a few examples that are maybe a tad lower in temperature than the one you're using.

You're lying about your record. You didn't do this and you didn't do that, but here are some terrible things that you did do, and everybody knows you did them, and that's not fun either, right? You turn to a public official or a candidate who's not yet a public official, and you just level these charges at them. Sometimes, as you can imagine, they're charges that either rest on the thinnest factual foundation or they're completely fact free.

And no, that's not entertaining. I remember, I won't cite the candidate and I won't cite the occasion. It's not in the book I write about debate prep. But this particular episode I didn't include, I remember throwing some trade related accusation at the, actually, it was not, it was a healthcare related accusation of a candidate.

Not, by the way, President Biden. And the candidate I was preparing asked for time out.

And so everybody was curious to know what's the timeout? And he turned to me and he said, I don't know.

There's no chance in the world that x, my opponent is going to say that. And I said, well, why not? And the answer was, because it's so obviously not true.

And my response was, well, that's exactly why he's going to say it. And he's already said it before I've picked it up. Right.

So, no, it's not fun for the candidate you're preparing, and it's not fun for you in preparing the candidate, but it's the job.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Big picture on the job. What do you think the key is to a successful debate against someone like Donald Trump who is more likely to interrupt, more likely to be personal, more likely to shout over you, or kind of creepily loom in the background, as Hillary Clinton learned in 2016.

Donald Trump
Let me speak generically, because I can't really speak to this debate prep. I have to be cautious about it.

But I think, generally speaking, the key to a good debate, of course, preparation, first and foremost, thorough preparation.

But I think candidates, in answering questions, want to communicate an authentic sense of who they are. They can use the excesses of their opponent to their advantage. They're in front of many, many millions of people, and people are going to take their measure. And so if one candidate, to borrow a famous expression, decides to go very low, it serves the candidate on the other side to stay high, not to take the bait. I mean, that's generally what I've seen work best in debate preps over the years, and that has served the candidates themselves very well.

Tommy Vitor
Last question on debates. I think there's a sense among a lot of folks on Republicans, Democrats, and voters that the recent debates haven't necessarily served the electorate well when it comes to talking about issues or getting good information out. I was honestly happy to see that President Biden decided to go around the debate commission to negotiate directly with networks and get this new schedule going because the initial debate plan had the candidates debating after states had already started voting, which just seems absurd on its face.

Material change for this upcoming debate next week is there's no studio audience in the candidate. Microphones will be muted when they're not talking. Do you think that will have an impact to just make the discourse better?

Donald Trump
I certainly hope so. And as you know, when I write about this in the book, I have real reservations about the presidential debate structure. That is to say, I'm sorry, the one that was typically sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

And I was part of a study group that the Annenberg school at the University of Pennsylvania assembled to look at reforms in the debate process.

And certainly some of what you know will be the features of this particular debate, I think are an improvement. Not having all this hoopla, an audience, moderators having to counsel people not to shout or laugh or hoot or whatever it is, let the two candidates standing side by side Kennedy Nixon style, speak to the american public and then cut the theatrics out. And the theatrics, by the way, are cut out. In part, that emphasis against theatrics is served by muting a microphone so that one candidate can't break in and try to grab, quote unquote, a moment. And that gets me to a point I do feel strongly about. When debates are covered, the coverage often focuses on the line, the moment.

Tommy Vitor
Right.

Donald Trump
What is most exciting, which will immediately get the most attention.

What you hope for is a debate that's not defined just by the line. It's defined by the 90 minutes that the two candidates are being required to address questions seriously and then treat the voters seriously and let them hear that. Whereas if you have them in a sort of cage match fighting style, that might suit the video clips that are going to be posted about the debate and draw a large audience the next day. But I wouldn't say it's the best thing for the process.

Tommy Vitor
Could not agree more. Okay. In your book, the unraveling, you say that you feel like we are experiencing a crisis in public, faith in politics writ large. And one of the reasons why is because people who work in politics treat it as blood sport.

Winning seems to justify almost any tactic. You're quite introspective in writing the book, and you write about times in the past where you feel like you are part of the problem. And first of all, I should have to say, Bob, like, I've worked on a bunch of campaigns now.

I've worked with a few, but not a lot of people that I felt were kind of scummy and unethical. You are, like, nowhere near that list. You are on the furthest other side, like a lawyer who kept people on the straight and narrow. So I was wondering, what sparked this introspection? Is this an act of political absolution? How are you feeling writing this thing?

Donald Trump
Well, first of all, I appreciate that comment. I really do. And I do feel like we worked on campaigns that were tough minded and very much committed to winning, but stayed really within the lines. But having said that, I just thought for us to have a serious conversation about the state of our politics, which are bad.

And I will say a little bit more about that just in a second, that it was important for me to kind of own up to choices that I faced, some of which I don't regret at all. I was happy to be seen as a lawyer who was a can do lawyer could help campaigns win, or a can do government lawyer who could help chart a path for the president to fulfill a policy objective. But I also wanted to be clear that there were sometimes choices I made that were more complicated than the time I saw them to be. And I think its important for that self reflection at this particular time, when we see, a, how very wrong things have gone, I mean, how much trouble we are generally in, in our politics, and b, how much attention people who have positions of responsibility in politics and government need to pay to those issues. I mean, it really is in their hands. A norm is just a free floating abstraction. Like, don't treat your adversary like an enemy. Try to defeat, but not destroy. But that abstraction doesn't have any life to it, except in particular circumstances where somebody has a choice about how to write an ad or how to write a press release or what to say in a debate or what to say online.

And so those choices are ones that I think now, particularly given our current circumstances, people like you, me, and others who've been very much involved, people in government have to always be thinking seriously about, because these institutions are, they're in peril. These norms are in peril.

Tommy Vitor
We Democrats often point the finger at some of the sort of bold faced names in republican politics, like Lee Atwater or Karl Rove, for really sending us off a cliff when it comes to just gutter politics. But it wasn't, obviously, it wasn't just Republicans or republican operatives that did this. You write, there's a story in the book where you write about a McGovern aide who talked about jingling keys. Can you explain the context here in that story?

Donald Trump
Sure. And let me be very clear to say, this was a claim that he made, and I had no reason to believe, and I wasn't told that George McGovern knew about it.

But we were in a room during a tough cycle in which eventually, by the way, McGovern and other Democrats in the Senate lost in the Reagan landslide.

And he was talking about his kind of can do approach to things. And years before, he claimed, when McGovern was facing a conservative opponent in South Dakota who had, among a key credential, that he was a war hero, he had been captured and tortured, held in Vietnam, I think, for an extended period of time. And it apparently written somewhere in a memoir that he remembered distinctly to this day. And it just gave him, he just reacted strongly to the memory of a particularly sadistic jailer walking down the corridor, jingling his keys. He's approaching to open the door and visit whatever horror on the captive that he was. And he told the story about a debate in which he claims he positioned himself slightly off stage. And when his candidate and this were veteran, took the stage to debate, at some point, he quietly jingled his keys and he professed, he claimed that it really threw the opponent off. And I remember there was a, I was young, and I was back on my heels about this. There was a little bit of embarrassment, but there was also a significant amount of kind of admiring laughter, like, wow, now that's really thinking through something at a critical moment that could be helpful to your candidate.

You look back on that and you say, no, no. And it's hard for me to imagine that George McGovern knew about that. I didn't know him well, but if it actually happened. But I was trying to describe a mindset.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah.

If you're trying to trigger a pavlovian response in a person who was tortured as a POW, you have lost the threat. You should get out of politics.

Donald Trump
Go do something else. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Tommy Vitor
So one issue that worries me a lot that you also write about is money in politics. And it's an area where some critics will point the finger at you and me and the Obama campaign for being part of the problem, because one thing we did in 2008 was opt out of the public financing system and rely instead entirely on private fundraising. And so, look, whatever you think about that decision, things have gotten way worse since that time because of the Supreme Court's citizens United decision, which allowed corporations and groups to spend unlimited amounts on our elections. There have been subsequent decisions in the courts or by the FEC that have loosened up the rules even more, where it feels to me, and I want to know if you disagree, like, our campaign finance system is just broken, where do you rank the question of money and politics on your list of reasons why we're in this crisis of faith in politics? And do you have recommendations for how we could fix it?

Donald Trump
So in that chapter, I acknowledge I've always been a skeptic about overregulation of political money. I mean, set aside the fact that it has never been successful in this country. Every time a roadblock is put up, the parties, candidates, whatever, become determined to get around the roadblock and employ lawyers, and sometimes don't even bother with lawyers to try to do that. And so I do think the campaign finance system, in that sense, that the over regulation of politics is a self defeating exercise. And that's one point I would make. I go on at length about this. I'll just make that one point to begin with. But secondly, I think we do have to be mindful that campaign finance reform, in my experience, is something that is embraced somewhat opportunistically when Democrats had no money, or they thought they didn't. When I started out in the seventies, early eighties, Republicans, they believed, and I think rightly so, routinely outraged them and outspent them in major races. Democrats were very concerned about getting money out of politics. We've become a lot more competitive. And you and I recall the Obama campaign had plenty of money, and our supporters wanted us to spend every last dime. In fact, we had so much money, if you recall, Tommy, we had a surplus when the campaign was over. We didn't have another way to spend it.

And I sometimes in asking people about sort of what they mean about there's too much money in politics, I asked them the following question in the democratic audience.

What limit would you Democrats be prepared to live with in spending money to defeat Donald Trump? And I have yet to get a taker.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, no, that's fair. I mean, I think that's a fair criticism. But then I hear about the british political system, for example, where you've got like a six week long election and pretty well defined spending limits. And I think to myself, man, that sounds nice. No?

Donald Trump
Well, it would be constitution possible for us to compress our campaign, period, in that way. But this is where ethics matters. And let me, and I use, I explain this in the book. There's, sometimes law is the answer to the problem, and sometimes a heightened ethical sensibility and accountability is the answer to the problem, although it may be not as dependable, although the legal reforms aren't all that dependable. Take the example of a candidate who raises money from people who are thinking of supporting them or are supporting them. At what point is that just representative democracy? You raise the money from the people who like you, who like what you've done or will like what you do. And at what point does it come a kind of corrupt transactionalism. If you have somebody come to you about a policy issue and make their case and then offer to raise money for you, do you accept that offer in that context? And there are a lot of gradations of complication in this world.

The largest protection against corruption of the system are candidates who have ethical sensibility. And this goes back a long way.

I wasn't a voting citizen when he was in the Senate, but Paul Douglas of Illinois was a reformer who held in the Senate seat for many years. He wrote a book called Ethics and Government. And in that book, he talks about ethical sensibility on the part of public officials, they owe a certain degree of care and judgment to managing issues that I don't think can really be successfully managed by clamping major restrictions down on money.

Tommy Vitor
I mean, a lot of what you're writing about and thinking about is basically like an age old means versus the ends moral debate. Right. And it's especially fraught in this country with the winner take all system because we basically have an ideologically split country. We're split 50 50. Now. The extremes of each party sort of move inexorably further away from each other, but we remain split, which is an interesting thing about our electorate. But, you know, a swing of 100,000 voters here or there can lead to radically different outcomes. So it really is, it's very easy in that context to justify these win it all cost tactics. And you also constantly hear people in both parties arguing, we need to get tougher because the other guys are tougher. Right. Trump says it all the time about democrats.

They're tough, they're vicious, they fight dirty. We don't. We feel like we Democrats can be squishy and wimpy at times. It's this slide where each side feels constantly pushed to be more extreme. Do you have a recommendation for how to arrest that slide?

Donald Trump
Well, no. I agree with you. That is the pressure. And it's understandable when the stakes in an election are really high and people think that loss is unthinkable.

Here's where I come out. Maybe I'll be proven wrong.

I reject the premise that you can't be tough in your campaigns. You can't be hard charging. You can't be aggressively competitive and win ethically. I think you can. You and I look back on the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, and those weren't easy campaigns for all sorts of reasons, including the election of the first black president in the history of the country.

We're proud of those campaigns. Did we do everything exactly the way, looking back from a strategic or other point of view, we should have done it. I mean, nobody's perfect, but we were proud of those campaigns and we won them both.

And I'm proud of the 2020 campaign that I was involved in, and he won. So I just reject the idea that the choices between a kind of do whatever it takes politics and losing, I think you can be aggressive, hard charging, really outsmart and outgun the other side without starting to look like them and act like them, because that spiral is one that we can pretend that we can one day get out of, and we may never get out of it. We may be trapped in it.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah, no, that's fair. But I imagine there's some listeners hearing us talk and thinking this Trump brings a new level of risk. Right? He tried to stage a coup he calls the January 6 insurrectionists warriors. Now he's talking about using the DOJ to punish his enemies in a second term. And there's this, I think, legitimate fear that a second Trump term could irreparably damage our country and our democracy itself in ways that we just can't go back on. Given that risk, I mean, what would you say to someone who argues that justifies some real bare knuckle stuff?

Donald Trump
Well, I'm not troubled by bare knuckle in the sense of really aggressive politics.

I'm not troubled by that. But Richard Nixon engaged in bare knuckle tactics to try to win reelection in 1972. And quite rightly, he lost his office. And many of his senior aides ended up indicted and in jail, either by conviction or plea.

I think that it depends on how you define bare knuckle.

I have to have faith, and I do have faith, and I'll give you one reason why I do that. At the end of the day, there is still such a powerful desire to retain the fundamental democratic culture, small d democratic culture of our country, that we can depend upon, that we can appeal to, that we can fulfill its promise and still defeat someone like Donald Trump. I'm quite confident that we can do that. And the only thing I want to say, I don't want to ramble on, is in my nonprofit.

When I say nonprofit, my non bipartisan voting work that I do, at the same time that I'm very involved in this campaign. I co chair a couple of organizations with Ben Ginsburg, who was Mitt Romney's general counsel, long time republican. We travel around the country to support election officials and to bring them together with community leaders and to show them support and to support them in the conduct of professional elections. And in those conversations, we have Republicans in the room, republican community leaders, and republican election officials, as well as Democrats on both sides. And they may not be prepared to go and shout it on social media. There's definitely an atmosphere of fear that has developed in the republican party, which is just dreadful, reprehensible. The fear of retribution, the fear of being called out, trolled, right, harassed.

But in those rooms, I sense a commitment to the system. They probably agree with Trump about regulations. They agree with them about taxes. They agree with him about a whole host of things, maybe down the line. They agree with everything in the Republican Party. Platform, for all I know. But they do believe that they live in a democracy and they want that democracy respected. And they're deeply troubled by the wing of the party, the republican party, which is not the entire republican party, but it is the dominant wing of the republican party that basically has no use for them. It's not only defying the norms, it's frontly questioning them, it's repudiating them. And I don't find comfort, even among Republicans that I deal with around the country with that at all.

Tommy Vitor
Hopefully, those people can kind of regrab the reins of the republican party sooner rather than later.

Donald Trump
Well, I agree. I think that's a real problem.

Tommy Vitor
One sort of associated and worrisome trend, I think, is the extremity of the courts. We have a conservative majority in the Supreme Court that it seems increasingly activist and partisan and, frankly, just shameless.

They don't seem embarrassed by accepting lavish gifts from people with business before the court or, you know, they don't seem embarrassed by criticism of these conflicts of interest. In fact, they mostly just lash out. And they blame the press or Democrats or in some cases their neighbors, who are just walk in the dog and get screamed at or have a flag flown in their face. Do you have ideas for how to address this total disregard for ethics or accountability in the Supreme Court itself?

Donald Trump
So a lot of the complaints, and you say in a polarized politics, it's not surprised that the Supreme Court wasn't spared the fate of other institutions. It used to be at the top of the list. You'd have Congress way, way at the bottom, then the presidency at various points. But the court, and the Supreme Court in particular, would enjoy generally favorable public ratings. And that has changed because it's been swept up in the general unhappiness in the electorate division, polarization and the like.

I spent a lot of time on these issues over the period of time that I was on the Biden Supreme Court commission, the presidential commission on the Supreme Court.

And, of course, there have been periods in american history where the court has come very much into sort of into contention and in some quarters in disrepute, because it was viewed, think about the Roosevelt era and the great court packing controversy as weighing in on major issues in a way that was undemocratic and ideologically driven.

And I think that the only answer right now to that is for pressure to be appropriately expressed, put on the court to pay attention to these criticisms. They did finally, for example, adopt an ethics code. It wasn't precisely what I was looking for. It wasn't fully satisfactory, but they did it because they responded to the public criticism, and all nine justices signed onto it. As I said, it's deficient in any number of respects, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Likewise, as you know, there were criticisms of the management of their emergency orders docket, the so called shadow docket, where they were deciding major issues without argument, without briefing, and, frankly, even without transparency about which justices had voted which way. And that even became a topic of conversation on the court, and they began to step somewhat back from that. And so I think that it's really in public debate that this is going to take effect. It may not be immediately apparent, won't necessarily cause, you know, people who don't like Justice Alito to see him fleeing in retreat. It will have an institutional impact, or at least we have to hope so, because we can't live without some fundamental respect for these institutions. They play such a critical role in our, our system.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I mean, one thing that's been, I think, challenging for Democrats is there is, you know, there's a sense in the country of a broader frustration with the political system and politics itself and the feeling that it hasn't worked. And yet we are the party that believes in institutions and tries to defend them. And you see that in defending the justice system or the FBI for, you know, trying to do its job and investigate, for example, interference in the 2020 election, the intelligence community. But you and I know as people who have worked in government and also just read history books that these institutions are flawed at best, and at times in our history, they've done wildly unethical things. Right? I mean, FDR, who's a hero to a lot of people, was getting regular briefings from J. Edgar Hoover about his political opponents, something that would be enormously problematic if it came out today. How do you think we can strike a balance between defending institutions while not seeming to suggest that they are perfect or can't be criticized or at least trying to hear people who feel like, actually, my experience with the justice system is that it's been broken in some way.

Donald Trump
So that's the key question. And I'm glad you put it that way, because I think it's really important.

What happens in these debates is each side drives the other one into refusing to give any ground whatsoever.

They just can't give up. And so if the attack is on a particular institution and it's ferocious enough and the good faith motives of the people attacking are suspected, then the defense of that institution becomes kind of uncompromising. And as you point out, they then become blind to the possibility that there are significant institutional problems. And again, I go back to the Republicans that I talk to even today.

Let me give you two hopeful examples, if I could, really quickly. Two reform initiatives. The American Law Institute organized two working groups that I've been involved with.

I co chaired each of them with Jack Goldsmith, who I wrote a book about presidential institutional reform with, called after Trump a few years ago. He's a well known and highly published professor of law at Harvard. And we co chaired working groups to look at, in the first case, reform of the Electoral Count act, and the other case, reform of the Insurrection act, by which presidents can deploy, without any apparent statutory limits, troops to quell, quote, unquote, insurrections, rebellions, illegal combinations, conspiracies. There's a lot of vague language in the statute. In both those cases, we put together behind closed doors, fully bipartisan groups that included officials of both the Obama and the Trump administration.

And we agreed we'd have these conversations behind closed doors. If we couldn't reach agreement, we'd walk away without a word to one another or to anyone else. And if we could agree, we would, would put something out in our name as a group. To give you an example, I was, in both cases, we had, for example, in the Electoral Count Reform act, one of the participants in the work group was Don McGahn, who was Donald Trump's first White House counsel.

Judge Mukasey participated. Judge Michael Mukhesi participated. Courtney Elwood, who used to be the general counsel to the CIA under Donald Trump.

And then Democrats you would recognize immediately on our side, like Jay Johnson in the Insurrection act reform, who was secretary of homeland security, general counsel of the Defense Department, obviously a Democrat through and through, and a senior official in the Obama administration, Mary DeRosa. Remember Mary DeRosa, who was the national security legal advisor in the Obama administration.

So just some of the people involved were hardcore Republicans, hardcore Democrats, including people from the Trump and Obama administrations, two administrations that could not be more unlike. And in both cases, we reached agreement. And in both cases, we put out consensus points about potential institutional reform.

And in one case, electoral count act reform. We participated in what turned out to be a successful congressional debate. I testified. We were very involved with the staff in helping to work through some of the drafting issues.

And we're going to hope to make similar progress on Insurrection act reform. So we can do it, but we've got it with the people who are willing to participate in good faith, close the door, keep everybody out of it for a minute and say, let's have a conversation that is candid and fair minded and respectful of points of view, and let's see where it takes us. Is it always going to be successful? No, but we have to do that kind of thing.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Look, I think the blueprint there, which is getting people into a room, speaking to each other face to face like human beings, that is definitely the path forward for solving a lot of problems in this country. Unfortunately, our politics is increasingly being fought in a social media battle. And in the book, you write about your extreme frustration with some of the social media platforms in the 2020 election for their failure to fact check misinformation by political candidates. Four years later, the Biden campaign is understandably very frustrated with this wave of misleadingly edited videos of President Biden that seemed to go viral every day. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I would imagine that the conversation with these tech platforms gets more complicated when you are the president himself, because you could run into real First Amendment problems. How do they manage this? Is there any kind of, is there anything the White House can do to constructively engage?

Donald Trump
Well, on the policy side, I'm sure there is, but I do want to stress, and that's what I cover in the book, on the campaign side, the president's a candidate like any other. At the time, he wasn't the president. He was former vice president. Now he's the president. And he can engage as a candidate even as he occupies the White House. Now there are choices to be made. We're going back again to the question of choices. How do you go about doing it? How much transparency do you provide the public about what you're saying and why you're saying it, the arguments of support, of what you're trying to accomplish, and that all should condition how you proceed. But I think, like, in 2020, we are going to be heard. The campaign is going to be heard and has to be heard on these issues, because, as you point out, they play a really significant role in some of the problems that we're facing in this democracy. The quality of the debate, the quality of discourse, the treatment of the voters, the treatment of opponents.

It's a very serious problem.

Tommy Vitor
Yeah. The book, again, is called the reflections on politics without ethics and democracy in crisis. Bob Bauer, thank you for doing the show. And thank you. I think it's really actually valuable when people like you at your level are introspective and reflect on both the good and the bad in a public life and in a career in politics. So thanks for writing the book.

Donald Trump
Well, thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. Tommy.

Tommy Vitor
Thanks again to Bob Bauer for doing the show. Dan, great to see you. I guess we'll be back on Monday, per usual. I guess unless the Supreme Court dumps a big nightmare's worth of cases on our head tomorrow, we might be forced to do something but cross that bridge when we get there, I guess.

Dan Pfeiffer
Yeah, I've been refusing to open any emails about that just in case.

Tommy Vitor
Smart. Smart move. All right, buddy, talk to you soon.

Dan Pfeiffer
All right, bye, everyone.

Joe Biden
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