Has the Media Surrendered to Trump? (feat. Chuck Todd)

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Speaker 16 Welcome to Pot Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
Politics and media are inextricably entwined. The politicians who succeed are usually the ones who best understand how the media is changing.

Speaker 16 If you want to understand what's happening in politics and where it's going, you must understand the media environment.

Speaker 16 That's why I'm talking to veteran journalist Chuck Todd, the former host of Meet the Press, for our Sunday show this week.

Speaker 16 Chuck left NBC earlier this year to explore the greener pastures of independent journalism, to pursue a new model for saving local news, and to host his podcast, the Chuck Toddcast.

Speaker 16 So he's got a foot in both camps, old media and new media. Chuck is also one of the political press's biggest defenders and detractors when appropriate.

Speaker 16 Chuck is a giant political junkie who knows everything that's happening in every race at every every level.

Speaker 16 Today, we're going to discuss the changing media environment, how the press is covering Trump, and whether Democrats have figured out how to communicate in this new era.

Speaker 16 Chuck Todd, welcome to the show. Dan Pfeiffer, it's good to see you.
I think I was one of your guests on the first month of your launch, if I'm not mistake. Yes, you were.
You were. It was

Speaker 16 a very highly listened to and quite controversial episode, if I remember correctly. I don't know.
Every episode you guys do is controversial to somebody. You know,

Speaker 16 the beauty of social media is if you want to be controversial, somebody will help you be controversial. Yes, that is true.
That is true. That is what Twitter slash X has done for us.

Speaker 16 You were the host of Meet the Press. I'm going to do what Chuck Todd would do: I'm going to start with the news of the week here.
We are recording this on Donald Trump's 101st day in office.

Speaker 16 We are coming to the close of a series of media retrospectives looking at his 100th day. There are 100 days in the White House.
There are two themes that run through this.

Speaker 16 One is that he has the lowest poll numbers of of almost any president at this hundredth day and is in a big political mess.

Speaker 16 And the second one is that he is the most consequential president at this mark in his presidency. What do you make of those two assessments? By the way, I love the word consequential.

Speaker 16 How often I now hear this word consequential.

Speaker 16 Mitch McConnell. Where else are you hearing it? Well, because Mitch McConnell defenders won't say he was a great senator.
They'll say he's one of the most consequential senators.

Speaker 16 The point is, the word is such a beautiful word because you don't, it's a way to

Speaker 16 impart importance without necessarily saying they were good or bad. Well, they're consequential.
Okay. Right? You know, the point is, is that it really is such an interesting, subjective word.

Speaker 16 And I kind of look at it as a bit of a weasel word, right? But personally, because I think the word, and I get it, right? Because he is consequential, sure.

Speaker 16 And so's, you know, so's a wild animal in my yard consequential in the moment, right? That's going rabid on us, right?

Speaker 16 You're like, yeah it's consequential in the moment anyway no you i don't know if you if you get the point i'm trying to say but i just i do i do it's a way to say that he matters without saying that he is bad or good right george w bush i used to say really consequential president because at the end of the day at the time you were like well doesn't look like iraq's going to age well

Speaker 16 we'll see and it hasn't and it hasn't and in fact the legacy has somehow led the to the republican party to no longer even believe in half the policies they used to believe in the bush era no i I look at the, you know, the poll that I sort of been obsessed over of all the polling, even though they've all been very similar, has been Pew's, because Pew had a large enough sample to have some interesting little,

Speaker 16 they were able to,

Speaker 16 I think, correctly find the following, right? And which you see tidbits up there, which is

Speaker 16 people don't like the execution of Donald Trump, but that they have yet, they're not yet souring on his goals, right?

Speaker 16 And I think the Pew poll did the best job of at least showing that where, you know, what he's trying to do, there's still support for out there. How his execution, though, is something that

Speaker 16 voters don't like at all. And then you see that when you see, oh, the Democrats are not, it's not a seesaw, right? Trump goes down, Democrats go up.
You're not seeing that yet, right?

Speaker 16 Nothing, whatever the Democrats haven't penetrated yet.

Speaker 16 You know, the best way you could say it is, Democratic messaging has yet to penetrate, or they're just not focused on it, or there is no unified democratic message, which is probably closer to being the correct answer.

Speaker 16 And then the other thing that I found interesting in the Pew poll is they did this subset. They did this subset of non-voters.

Speaker 16 And what was interesting, because this to me tells me about the media climate. So at the start of his presidency in Pew, non-voters from 2024 approved, gave him a 44% job approval.

Speaker 16 So skeptical, but 44. Now he had collapsed down to 31 job approval among among people that didn't vote.
What that tells me, because that's non-voters are usually lower information voters.

Speaker 16 And what I mean by that is they're just not paying attention. It doesn't mean they're dumb.
These are people that are busy or just aren't as engaged. But what they're getting, they don't like, right?

Speaker 16 So it does tell me that it's all bad for Trump right now, right? His media environment. I mean, Dave Portnoy is out there complaining about him, right? He doesn't even have a unified,

Speaker 16 the right-wing machine is not even unified in celebrating his first 100 days.

Speaker 16 So I just think this has been political malpractice, how they've handled this first 100 days, because there were ways to make this better.

Speaker 16 And they have just, I mean, can you imagine if you didn't have George W. Bush to blame for the economy

Speaker 16 after 100 days

Speaker 16 taking over in the Obama presidency? And Donald Trump said, yeah, I'm going to make sure everybody knows this is my economy now, right? Like, you're like, okay, brother, it's all yours.

Speaker 16 You don't get to blame Biden anymore because you have actually impacted the direction of this economy and every voter now knows it.

Speaker 16 I mean, which is the blame Biden thing is interesting because Trump did today on Wednesday. He truthed that this was Biden's stock markets, the overhang of Biden's economy.

Speaker 16 Man, I'm old enough to remember when the surge in the stock market during the transition was supposed to be Donald Trump's stock market surge. So I'm very confused.

Speaker 16 Yes. I mean, he took credit for stock market searches when Biden was president based on what he said to be polling that suggested he would win.
Right. No, he's not consistent on this.
Yeah. I know.

Speaker 16 We're shocked that Donald Trump isn't consistent.

Speaker 16 The blaming Biden thing is interesting because as you point out, it wasn't for most of Obama's first term, voters in polling blamed Bush as much or more than Obama for the state of the economy.

Speaker 16 Now, there was a certain set of facts there, which was the economy collapsed before Obama was president.

Speaker 16 No, I mean, the facts were on his side, but he, but in this way, I mean, I really believe that Trump could have convinced many people that, hey, this inflate, you know, we're still recovering from Biden's inflationary mess and all this stuff.

Speaker 16 And nope, not anymore. Yeah, he, there was, there was a failure to manage expectations for sure.

Speaker 16 Like, there's a way in which he could have said, this is going to take, you know, this is like what Obama used to say all the time. We didn't get in this mess overnight.

Speaker 16 We're not going to get out overnight.

Speaker 16 And it's going to take time. But he, But launching the tariffs

Speaker 16 was the thing that, I mean, when you look, there's a world where he could have just not decided to blow up the economy himself.

Speaker 16 That's the thing.

Speaker 16 It's not like he rhetorically messed it up. He substantively messed it up.
Correct.

Speaker 16 His chief architect with this tariff regime, Oren Cass, wrote this op-ed in the New York Times that laid out a much more reasonable way to have tried to execute this, which is essentially...

Speaker 16 you put out what you're going to do, but you give everybody six months. You actually don't do anything until October, until the fall, and you give yourself time for both business to prepare itself and

Speaker 16 perhaps trade deals to take place. But that's not the Donald Trump way.
And, you know,

Speaker 16 if you actually are an advocate of this policy, you should be really angry with Donald Trump because he may tarnish the whole idea for decades.

Speaker 16 Yeah, as we're recording this, the Senate may pass a, or the Republican Senate may pass a resolution of disapproval on the Trump tariffs.

Speaker 16 And it's all going to to depend on if enough senators show up to the public. I didn't expect this to happen

Speaker 16 until the spring of next year.

Speaker 16 I mean, because it shows people would be

Speaker 16 because you think they'd be separating for the election. So I do.
You know,

Speaker 16 my three early primary guys that I'm obsessed with are Tillis, Cassidy, and Cornyn, right? None of the three are MAGA Republicans. All three are going to face primary challenges in Senate races.
And

Speaker 16 the assumption right now is they're going to lose their primaries. You can't beat MAGA in a primary.
I think the evidence so far has been true.

Speaker 16 But I'm very curious if one year from now, is it an asset for Tom Tillis that he's not MAGA? Is it an asset for John Cornyn that he's not MAGA in a Republican primary?

Speaker 16 I'm skeptical, but now I'm curious to watch to see if voters change. I mean, that's interesting because it's still in a Republican primary.
You're talking about the highest turnout

Speaker 16 of Republican voters. And

Speaker 16 there's one exception, and this could work for Cornyn, perhaps, I guess, but there's the one exception of someone who beat MAG in a primary is Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but he obviously has high approval and 100% name ID, and he was running against a terrible candidate.

Speaker 16 And governors, you want to know the single toughest thing to do is stop a governor from winning reelection.

Speaker 16 It is probably harder than anything. I mean, look at, it's one of these things, if you're a true junkie listening to Dan and I here, go look at the history.

Speaker 16 Governors are harder to prevent from their first re-election and probably any other elected official there is out there. You know,

Speaker 16 as you pointed out,

Speaker 16 we have not had a seesaw effect. As Trump has gone down, Democrats have not gone up.

Speaker 16 Our party's approval rating is still

Speaker 16 at its lowest level.

Speaker 16 Although there have been gains for the Democrats in the generic ballot, up three, I think, in the most recent average I saw, which is not great, but it is an improvement of where we were six months ago.

Speaker 16 What do you make of the sort of internal debate within the Democratic Party about whether we, you know, the the James Carville play dead, the sort of David Shore focus on the economy and tariffs only,

Speaker 16 the sort of Chuck Schumer don't be in charge of the shutdown, the go after them on everything, or the Bernie Sanders AOC fight the oligarchy. Just what's your sort of take on what Democrats are doing?

Speaker 16 And perhaps if you have thoughts on what they should be doing? Well,

Speaker 16 can I quote Barack Obama, the don't do stupid shit? Yeah. You know, idea too, which is, I think that's the position I'd be in this this early, which is just don't do stupid shit, right?

Speaker 16 Don't get out of your way. It's a little bit of Carville, a little bit like, but, but I look at it this way.
I think a good, loud, messy debate would be healthy for the party.

Speaker 16 Now, you and I are, you and I are old enough to go back to the, I'm obsessed with the 88 to 92 experience,

Speaker 16 right? Which was, you know, 88 was...

Speaker 16 was was one of those moments where Democrats just couldn't believe they got crushed. It was one thing to lose, but they got crushed.
And it became this massive external fight, right?

Speaker 16 And so you had Bill Clinton essentially deciding to start almost an alternative party in the DLC at the time.

Speaker 16 He picked a fight with the Jesse Jackson wing of the party purposely, right?

Speaker 16 In many ways, to

Speaker 16 differentiate himself. And there was a knockdown, drag out fight at times.
Ron Brown was the DNC chair.

Speaker 16 God, I remember it's so funny to see how close Ron Brown and Bill Clinton came once he won the presidency.

Speaker 16 But there was a time when Ron Brown was DNC chair where they saw Bill Clinton and the DLC as an archenemy, right, as trying to upend what they were doing.

Speaker 16 But what's interesting about that experience, and I would argue also the experience you had in 05, 06, and 07, which was also a similar period of Democratic introspection, that I would argue all of this is what you should,

Speaker 16 everybody should strike their own path to see what's working. This is a spaghetti at the wall moment.

Speaker 16 What's good for AOC may not be good for Westmore, but what's good for Wesmore may not be good for what's Pete Buttigid. So,

Speaker 16 and at this point, I think the party is searching for a way. I think party leaders ought to be trying different things.
I think the two people with the hardest job are Jeffries and Schumer, right?

Speaker 16 Because they have the titles. So there's this expectation that they should be the leader, but what are they leading, right?

Speaker 16 It's really a hard. So I'm empathetic that it's hard for them to play leader, but right now they're the leader because there's nobody else.
So, you know, Schumer could be a better communicator.

Speaker 16 I don't know how Schumer became a bad communicator. He used to be a great communicator.
The world changed. And I don't know.
Yeah, it's fair.

Speaker 16 I mean, and it may be that he was a good communicator in the previous way that

Speaker 16 communicating took place. He has really struggled because I think he made the right decision.
I mean, I don't think the government's open right now, by the way, if they should.

Speaker 16 I'm convinced that Trump would have just

Speaker 16 selectively opened certain parts of government. There wouldn't have been,

Speaker 16 maybe I'm wrong, but I'm a cynic on that one. I do think that there was

Speaker 16 that this might, you might have been handing them an opportunity,

Speaker 16 not a potential loss. So I think his tactic was correct, but how he messaged it, right, absolutely made it seem worse.

Speaker 16 So I can't sit here and say any one idea is a bad idea and how everybody's doing because I kind of think this is a

Speaker 16 I think there needs to be a thousand flowers here and let's see which ones bloom.

Speaker 16 i would stay for just stay for the record here that while i am quite old i was in middle school and early high school during the 1988 to 1992 am i that much older than you i feel like you're poor no offense dan i'm an old soul i wish i were your age then you have an old soul there i'm an old soul exactly

Speaker 16 um but i do know that i do know that period and what is interesting about that is the idea behind the dlc and bill clinton was that the party had gone too far left we would defined ourselves out of the mainstream with the american people and we had to change in order to win election.

Speaker 16 One big issue, law and order. Yeah.
And welfare. And well, right.
It was government support, but it was law and order, right?

Speaker 16 And if you think about it, think about the two things Bill Clinton had to do in his 92 campaign, right? He had to,

Speaker 16 a mentally

Speaker 16 questionable person was put to death.

Speaker 16 He needed to show he was pro-death penalty. And, you know, it's still a, it is still a controversial decision to some people that he made, but not to the voters, right?

Speaker 16 He He was trying to virtue signal, hey, I'm a different type of Democrat. I'm not afraid of the death penalty.
I'm not afraid of using these things.

Speaker 16 And then, of course, the so-called Sister Soldier moment where he sort of had this cultural pushback.

Speaker 16 But, you know, that moment to me

Speaker 16 is: I wonder if somebody's going to try a Bill Clinton playbook, right? I think Gavin Newsom is kind of trying it right now, right?

Speaker 16 Which is, which is try really hard to almost pick a fight to show you're not a conventional progressive Democrat, at least on cultural issues.

Speaker 16 I don't know if that's going to be effective this time, but I do expect to see a few candidates try it or a few Democrats try it. I think that

Speaker 16 there's a flaw in that thinking, in my view, which is in 1988, the vector of American politics was left-right. And in 2025, it's inside, outside.

Speaker 16 And so I just don't think the voters, Trump is a perfect example of this, right? He is a very heterodoxical politician, at least in the way voters view him, right?

Speaker 16 They think he is more liberal on social issues than he actually is because he's a billionaire from New York.

Speaker 16 He talks about protecting Social Security and Medicare, ran to the left on Social Security and Medicare in the Republican primary and has like these elements of populism to him, but then is far right on a whole bunch of other things like immigration.

Speaker 16 And I just don't know that people will think about, if that is Newsom's plan, and I don't know that it is, I think that's a mistake. Well, it's interesting.
So let me throw something else at you.

Speaker 16 I have the other, my main thesis about 2728 is that the Democratic primary electorate is going to prioritize two things, new and electable.

Speaker 16 Now, the problem with electability is how subjective it is, right? You know,

Speaker 16 that is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, but some of that can bear out in polling and some of that.

Speaker 16 And if I were to new and electable is arguably how Barack Obama won, right? He made the case, hey, I'm new and let me prove to you that I'm electable.

Speaker 16 And if I recall, the 06 cycle was actually the cycle that proved he was electable because Barack Obama was invited to every red state Democratic. I think you were working Tim Johnson, right?

Speaker 16 I don't think you guys invited him. I was Evan Bayh in the 06 cycle.
We weren't opposed to the 2008. Evan Bayh, you were Tim Johnson in 02, right? Okay.

Speaker 16 But if I recall,

Speaker 16 there were a lot of red state Democrats that invited Barack Obama to campaign for him in 06, not many who invited Hillary Clinton, right? And that was sort of the first piece, you know, so

Speaker 16 he was able to create this case that, hey, I can go anywhere around the country. Oh, and oh, by the way, I'm also new, right?

Speaker 16 So, and the reason I assume it's new and electable is I think there'll be a desperation to win, right?

Speaker 16 Trump just exhausts everybody, just like we saw with Biden with the 2020 race and what happened there. And the Democratic Party always wants new, right?

Speaker 16 That has been the hallmark of when there's not an incumbent incumbent involved. You know,

Speaker 16 I've always believed the rise of Bernie Sanders had nothing to do with his politics and his ideology and everything to do with Hillary Clinton was the known candidate.

Speaker 16 Who's the new? All right, we'll try that. You know,

Speaker 16 I think there were a lot of people who could have been the alternative to Hillary had they run. They just, most people just didn't run.
And he was...

Speaker 16 he was really the only viable alternative that was out there.

Speaker 16 So I do think new will be the, will, will matter to, you know, and that, and what I mean by that is I don't think there's a name you and I will discuss today

Speaker 16 that

Speaker 16 might be that candidate, right? Like I, you know, think about Pete Buttigig.

Speaker 16 Pete Buttigig in 2017, who had him in the finals for the presidential nomination in 2020, right?

Speaker 16 You know, so I, I, I look around it. Maybe it's Abigail Spanberger, right?

Speaker 16 Maybe it's somebody we haven't thought of, a state senator that goes viral and pulls an upset in Kansas or nebraska or iowa right

Speaker 16 that's to me just as viable as corey booker figuring out a way to win the nomination i think um

Speaker 16 i would put a maybe this goes along with new

Speaker 16 but i think the democratic activists and donors are just going to put a lot of stock in the communications talent like can you get attention and i think one of the lessons of the like the people will take from the biden presidency and maybe probably unfairly so of Kamala Harris's 106 or whatever it was days is that we got out we got out communicated and we need someone who can go on the,

Speaker 16 we'll talk about someone who can go on Joe Rogan until the end of time, but it's something bigger than that.

Speaker 16 Somebody who can go on the Chuck Todcast. Someone who can go on the Chuck Todcast.

Speaker 16 That's where the real medal is made. Yes.
No, but actually what it really is, is can you go everywhere, not just specific places, right?

Speaker 16 Like, you know, I've always thought that that was Donald Trump's secret sauce. He said no to nobody.
And it was, I mean, it helped Obama. Obama was on Monday Night Football.
He was a Fortnite.

Speaker 16 Obama was a, would say no to nobody, right? Like that, that, you know, I used to think it was Chris Christie's, you know, special powers until he had his own, you know,

Speaker 16 he cost himself, but that used to be an advantage for him because he was willing to go anywhere.

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Speaker 16 talking about

Speaker 16 just how various potential 2028 Democrats are approaching this,

Speaker 16 Gretchen Whitmer, who has sort of brought out an approach, I think, to this that is surprising a lot of people. So she Whitmer versus Pritzker, right? Like two opposite ways to go.
Yes. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 16 Like Pritzker or Chris Murphy or anyone else who is all full bore anti-Trump all the time.

Speaker 16 Whitmer was in the White House last month, sort of ended up in an unfortunate situation where she, unbeknownst to herself, ended up in a executive order signing targeting individuals for criminal prosecution, was caught by the New York Times hiding her face with binders.

Speaker 16 And but then she was there to talk about a

Speaker 16 an important project for Michigan. That project was announced this week.
She was there.

Speaker 16 She didn't plan to speak at the Trump rally, but Trump did invite her on stage and she went up on stage and didn't

Speaker 16 praise Trump, but was grateful for the,

Speaker 16 but seemed somewhat, she wasn't rude to him for sure. What do you make of her approach, presuming, as I do, that she plans to run for president when her term as governor is up?

Speaker 16 Well, look, I think, you know,

Speaker 16 well, let me throw the question back at you.

Speaker 16 I was at dinner with a very prominent Democratic donor who then held very prominent ambassadorships in the the last two Democratic administrations, which I know actually doesn't give you a lot of clues because that's actually still a pretty reasonably long list.

Speaker 16 But you know, I won't. Even if I have a guess, I won't make it.
Don't say it because I don't want to do that.

Speaker 16 But it's the type of person. That's why I'm telling you this.

Speaker 16 You know who these, this is, I always say these, these people are the conventional wisdom, and I don't say that disparagingly. Like, you know, they're moving with where, and

Speaker 16 this person said to me, oh, that photo op, she's dead. She's never living that down.
It's over. And I'm like, really? I thought that was a little extreme, right? That it was over.
I will say this.

Speaker 16 I'm a believer that you got to lean. And

Speaker 16 I think you're building your presidential campaign. You should do it in the same way that good football teams

Speaker 16 use the draft, which is you double down on strength. Don't try to be something you're not.
Okay.

Speaker 16 Don't try to be something that your team's not built for. Don't try to be a politician that's off the brand, right? So her brand is what?

Speaker 16 That she is willing to go, you know, talk to red voters and blue voters. So her brand is the swing state person, all of that.

Speaker 16 So the problem is she got caught apologizing, essentially, for being with Trump, right? The first, the folder is kind of a version of apologizing.

Speaker 16 Ooh, I didn't mean, I didn't, I'm trying to reach out, but oh, I'm embarrassed there. Or even at the National Guard ceremony when her first instinct was, I wasn't planning on speaking.

Speaker 16 I thought that was a moment of weakness, which is, no, you got to be comfortable in your own skin. This is your strength, right? If she's in there, it's because she can win, right?

Speaker 16 It's because she can govern in a sort of from the middle out. And I'm not saying she's a centrist, but that that's so I think that the tactically,

Speaker 16 I think what she's done is right. Her execution, though, right? You look at it, her individual performance, it's like Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 16 He made the right decision, but you stepped on yourself, but because of how poorly you communicated, communicated, you know, you kind of communicated a flip-flop there.

Speaker 16 No, we're going to force it to shut down. No, no, we're not.
That's that's a terrible idea. You know, here's Whitmer.

Speaker 16 If you're trying to show you're willing to reach across the aisle and you're going to work with whoever you got to work with, then don't act like you're embarrassed when you get caught doing it.

Speaker 16 Right. So I don't know, you know,

Speaker 16 I think

Speaker 16 you're pretty good at identifying problems like that. Do you think that's going to be something that lingers for her that it becomes, it's sort of like it sits in that.

Speaker 16 You're like, well, you did the right thing, but why are you embarrassed about it? Right. I think she has plenty of time to fix it.

Speaker 16 It is going to, that picture will linger with the sort of people you had dinner with, the people who

Speaker 16 will. Those donors, right? And I wonder

Speaker 16 the kind of people that you're seeking endorsements from in wherever the primary is going to be this time, South Carolina, I guess, and Nevada. Like when you're sitting down with a state senator.

Speaker 16 Do we know the primary calendar? We do not. By the way, we do not

Speaker 16 think it exists because it was a one-year deal to

Speaker 16 where is jb pritzker so he goes to new hampshire because he didn't know where else to go could did he yeah i mean that's what the it's not on the list but it's what the press uh

Speaker 16 thinks of i think people assume it will not be iowa so it's right you might as well go to new hampshire and does vegas still like yes it'll be very important um but nobody there's it's so hard to get an event in Vegas because people, they're not, it's not a, it's not a political community that's used to it yet.

Speaker 16 Right. You know, there's an established, right? You know, oh, the five people, I need to get an audience of 50 in a New Hampshire event, right? Oh, yeah, I can, I got so-and-so on speed dial.

Speaker 16 And this is a good thing. I go to the Puritan back room, and I get 50 people from Manchester to do it, and we are good to go.
Yeah, that's what, that's why you do it.

Speaker 16 Um, so here, the point on Whitmer is I think that the, there's plenty of time to fix this.

Speaker 16 I agree with you that the like the question it will raise for people if she can't prove otherwise over the coming period of time and she'll have plenty of time to do it, is political instincts, right?

Speaker 16 Did she, the way that she played it did not work for her the way it should have. Like you either got to double down on it, she said, lean into it, find a moment in the oval.

Speaker 16 I have no problem. Like, if you want to work with, for, with the Trump administration, try to get something for your state, like that is still your job.
I get that.

Speaker 16 That is, that's why you were elected. And by the way, my guess is she promised she'd do that.
Right.

Speaker 16 It's been, right, it's been a big thing she's been working on from the very beginning. So she should deliver that.

Speaker 16 And I'm very sympathetic to where the situation Newsom was in in after the fires, where you have this capricious, vengeful president who might deny life-saving aid to your state.

Speaker 16 So you have to like do that dance. I get that.

Speaker 16 I think once you find yourself, even accidentally in the Oval Office while the president is targeting two individuals for criminal prosecution because they spoke out against him, you have to use, you don't, some people say he should have yelled in that moment, but then you got to go to the mics afterwards and condemn that.

Speaker 16 Even if it puts at risk the other project. Like there's a nimbleness, I think, that there will be.
Can you think of a moment?

Speaker 16 Do you remember a moment during your years where a candidate got caught in something and it's like, oh, boy, why don't you go clean it up there at the end?

Speaker 16 I feel like there's one of those happened during the Obama years, but I can't. Oh, there are plenty of

Speaker 16 plenty of them. I mean,

Speaker 16 just

Speaker 16 absolutely right.

Speaker 16 And that's why it's like I struggle with the Whitmer because I think, again, her brand is I work with everybody. And I think that's her,

Speaker 16 if you tell me, I always, I do the coma test. If I'm in a coma, I wake up and you tell me Gretchen Wimmer's the nominee.
Oh, well, she must have prioritized this, right? You know what I mean?

Speaker 16 Like you're just, and the party bought into the idea that, hey, we need somebody who can win and we need somebody who's

Speaker 16 willing to

Speaker 16 work with red voters as much as they were with blue voters, right? Like,

Speaker 16 so I get it, and that's why it's just poor execution. That's really what it was on both cases.

Speaker 16 We should also stipulate that anyone, like I agree with your coma test, but just we have no idea what voters are actually going to want when the primary even starts like the example i always use is after bush won in 04 the entire consensus was we need someone who can win a red state and in that vision was a white man right that's what like people cannot fathom uh or a lot of our younger listeners and staff that mark warner was the toast of the town in the year 2005 people were clamoring over themselves to work for mark warner they're like that was my first one that was one of my i think that was my first NBC scoop for them

Speaker 16 reporting that Mark Warner wasn't running.

Speaker 16 Which was a gigantic deal. I was working for Evan Bay at the time.
That was a big deal. Real visions of being the

Speaker 16 nickname of Evan Bay.

Speaker 16 And look, let's be honest. Why did you go work for Evan Bay? Because you cared about the state of Indiana's policies? Sure.
But you thought maybe that was a presidential campaign.

Speaker 16 Well, two reasons. One, he told me he was going to run for president.

Speaker 16 And two, almost as importantly, I had just helped make Tom Daschell the first Senate leader to lose re-election in 50 years. And so if someone's offering me a job, I'm taking that job.

Speaker 16 So, but yeah, that was the thought was that was a kind of electable candidate. And then two years later, Barack Hussein Obama

Speaker 16 from the South South Chicago via Indonesia and Hawaii wins the nomination and wins the presidency in a landslide. And so like we don't know by the way,

Speaker 16 but but that but that didn't mean that people weren't wrong. Right.
They had to figure out how to win some red states. Well, it turns out you needed a better communicator.

Speaker 16 If you have a good communicator, they can win a red state. You know,

Speaker 16 And frankly, I thought, well, anyway, he did.

Speaker 16 Obama always knew the limitations of his ideology. He may have believed,

Speaker 16 which is something that I think is

Speaker 16 a lost art these days. To know where the public is going to be.
Yeah, to sort of be able to balance, look, I have some views. You know, I always say this.
I get frustrated.

Speaker 16 People think they know my political views. I'm like, no, you don't.
I said, I just know how things get done, and I just believe you get most things done from the middle out. But on some issues,

Speaker 16 if I told you my position, you'd think I'm some radical lefty or some radical this or whatever.

Speaker 16 But the longer you live, right, the longer you see this town operate, you realize, well, if you want anything to stick, you gotta, you gotta start like take Obamacare.

Speaker 16 That was not the way he wanted to pass health care, not even structurally necessarily. But he decided, no, I want to do it.
So what's the best way to politically get it done? Right.

Speaker 16 And that's all I think voters are looking for. Are you a pragmatist enough to get to your goals? We don't care how you do it as long as you achieve a goal.

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Speaker 16 Let's transition a little bit to the state of the media today.

Speaker 16 You were the editor of The Hotline,

Speaker 16 which is when you and I first met, a publication that was literally faxed to my office. And every person in Washington ate their lunch while reading The Hotline, printed out on a piece of paper.

Speaker 16 Basically,

Speaker 16 it's pretty much the original newsletter, right? Yeah, for

Speaker 16 it's what Playbook and everything else is based on. It's all derivative.
The note was a derivative. All these things were derivative of the original hotline.

Speaker 16 But actually more valuable than these things because the internet was nascent.

Speaker 16 And what you would do is it would tell you what was happening in every state and every district because you guys you pulled what was happening.

Speaker 16 And we went out of our, we had to create a network of people that, I mean, Dan, if I told you, I mean, it's no different than, you know, building volunteers, but I had, you know, all sorts of weird relationships with people who liked clipping papers and faxing them to me for, in exchange for a free subscription of the hotline.

Speaker 16 And they got up, either they bought the Bulldog edition at one o'clock in the morning and sent me stuff or whatever. But yeah, that was our internet that we built.
You're at the hotline and then NBC

Speaker 16 as political director, then host of Meet the Press,

Speaker 16 White House correspondent. Ultimate sort of establishment media gave.
Yes, exactly. That's what you're going to say.
And now you have left NBC. You're an independent journalist.

Speaker 16 Out of the water, tell me.

Speaker 16 It's great. I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 16 The more the merrier.

Speaker 16 I want to ask you about your your decision, Duke, because I think it says something, not just about your journey, but maybe how media has changed over the 25 years that you and I have known each other.

Speaker 16 So just how did you end up hosting a podcast like I do?

Speaker 16 So, you know, it's a, look, it's a good question. I've sort of,

Speaker 16 you know, I've soured on traditional media because traditional media doesn't want to grow anymore.

Speaker 16 And it's not that, you know, one of the things I said about leaving NBC is, is, you know, the last year was hard because it was the first time I worked anywhere where there wasn't an environment to grow.

Speaker 16 Now,

Speaker 16 I've had to lay people off. I've been at cuts, but every other

Speaker 16 sort of time that there was a sort of a media recession, right, where you had to tighten the belt, but you would tighten the belt on some legacy media project or older media project, but you would double down and invest on what the new was, right?

Speaker 16 And there was always, and even my last two years of Meet the Press, I was focused on streaming, right? I was focused on getting the show ready for, like, it was clear we're headed here, you know, and

Speaker 16 it felt like where people were going to recover from cable, right? You know, cable was, cable feels like,

Speaker 16 I call cable news FM radio for the 90s, right? There's still money to be made, but you can feel that its relevance is slowly receding. FM radio, right?

Speaker 16 Radio had impact in the 90s, but you knew its relevance was receding, right?

Speaker 16 Howard Sterner, Russia Limbaugh could make some waves, but by the turn of the century, radio was almost irrelevant as a medium. And I don't know if that's 2030 with cable, right?

Speaker 16 It's going to be it.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 look,

Speaker 16 I sort of have a split personality here.

Speaker 16 I still feel like I've got something to say in the political analyst space.

Speaker 16 The one thing I was doing that I enjoyed the most at NBC was the podcast. I do think the Sunday show interview and frankly, the television interview as we know it in traditional media is just useless.

Speaker 16 I know that people are trying to make it useful, but

Speaker 16 whether it's politicians who are trying to use the medium to raise money or it's journalists trying to use the interview to become influencers, whatever it is, right? The podcast is the one, you know,

Speaker 16 for political discussions, having the 30 minutes, having the nuance, right, feels like it's just a more fulfilling time, both for the guest.

Speaker 16 I mean, every elected official I've interviewed so far, and whether it's in my previous version of the podcast or now,

Speaker 16 it's been easier to book them for this than it was for the Sunday show,

Speaker 16 right? Because

Speaker 16 the Sunday show felt like a stress test, right? And you were worrying about so many other things where this, you feel like you get a... So I just enjoy this format more, right?

Speaker 16 So just as personal, you know, thing. But the other part is

Speaker 16 you talk about the hotline. You know, I didn't own the hotline, but I felt like an entrepreneur, right? I felt like I was part of the ownership group.
I wasn't, trust me.

Speaker 16 This newsletter craze happened and we didn't make any money off of it. You know, that, that's always something I've, the late Doug Bailey and I used to laugh at all the time.

Speaker 16 But I do think we're in a moment of, you know, if you look at the history of, and I just go back to sort of the late 19th century, going through the last sort of 130 years of media, it's been a series of fragmentation and consolidations, right?

Speaker 16 When we figured out how to reproduce the photograph, magazines proliferated. And we had a slew of magazines in the 10s, the 20s, and the 30s.

Speaker 16 When the initial beginning of radio, man, there were radio stations all over, all locally owned, you know, but in each case, over time, you got consolidation, right?

Speaker 16 And every time a new technology came, there'd be some fragmentation, cable's another one. Over time, it turned into consolidation.

Speaker 16 We're now at a, look, streaming and the ability to sort of instantaneously be anywhere you want to be, interview anywhere you want to interview. I mean, think of this.

Speaker 16 It wasn't that long ago, Dan, that NBC used to have something called Where in the World is Matt Lauer. And it was a big deal because it was like,

Speaker 16 we're going to broadcast from the Gobi Desert, you know, right? Or we're going to broadcast from the South Pole. Well, anybody with a phone can do this now, right? Like there is no limits, right?

Speaker 16 So that is, notice that there's no, where in the world is Al Roker or, you know, I say this because that's, you're like, so what, right?

Speaker 16 You know, there's some Instagram feed that's probably been doing this for the last 10 years, right? Showing you in all these places. So

Speaker 16 I do think that I spent a year sort of on this journey to figure out why do they hate us? How did we lose trust?

Speaker 16 And the ultimate conclusion I came to was the loss of local, that the gutting of local news.

Speaker 16 I mean, I have this sort of cheap hot take line, which is a guy named Craig thought classifieds ought to be free. Yada, yada, yada, Donald Trump became president.
And

Speaker 16 it's, you know, because it turned out any news organization, newspaper that had

Speaker 16 a circulation of 50,000 or less, a majority of their revenue was classifieds. And so it just gutted.
It just gutted.

Speaker 16 And I do think that national media has never been fully trusted by people, but local media gave it where our character references, right?

Speaker 16 When local media is sort of reporting what we're reporting, oh, okay, right?

Speaker 16 You know, yeah, I, you know, I know those guys, or, you know, my kid goes to school with that guy's kid, or, you know, there was just a little bit more familiarity. And I think it gave us trust.

Speaker 16 And I think the loss of local is why. You know, the farther you are away from a politician or the farther you're away from a media person, the more you assume they don't know how you live, right?

Speaker 16 They don't understand your life. So I'm,

Speaker 16 I'm, you know, that's the, you know, when I'm not making content, that's what I'm focused on is I want to try to scale local news.

Speaker 16 I want to try to find a revenue stream because I don't think nonprofit's the answer. I think it hasn't worked.

Speaker 16 It's been, it's filled the vacuum, but it's unfortunately, I think a lot of these nonprofit news organizations are making too much what I call journalism for journalists and not enough service journalism.

Speaker 16 And I think local news really needs to be in service of the people that live in a community, meaning you're helping them live their lives versus national news, which I think is your civics, you know, telling you what, you know, what you need, you know, what the macro view of the world is.

Speaker 16 And I have a thesis that youth sports and high school sports can be the glue and the revenue stream that could be the future of local news. So in short,

Speaker 16 that's why this is exciting to me because I can both create a podcast, independently own it, and pursue this.

Speaker 16 You know, I'm just trying, I enjoy the fact that I don't have to ask permission to some corporate parent to do anything right now.

Speaker 16 The local thing is really interesting in terms of how it affects our politics.

Speaker 16 You know, I was talking, I did an interview with John Tester after he lost, and one of the things we talked about was how much the decimation of local news in these red states has hurt Democrats.

Speaker 16 Like when I worked for Tim Johnson in 2002, senator from South Dakota,

Speaker 16 he only won re-election because we were able to run a campaign where he was in the local press all the time. So people knew who he was and what he did, as opposed to the caricature of him.

Speaker 16 And so, like, that is like Tester was saying, like, how much that had changed from when he first won in 06 or whatever it was to now was there just wasn't those people who could tell your story to people like in a non-polarized way.

Speaker 16 And so it does have a huge,

Speaker 16 huge impact in what's happening in politics.

Speaker 16 No, and I think if, and look, this is not just about, you know, starting a local news organization that is only focused on trying to figure out what's happening at city council meetings.

Speaker 16 It's also just simply about helping people.

Speaker 16 Where do I find a restaurant I can take my family out tonight that isn't going to be break the bank?

Speaker 16 And hey, did you know this store's got, you know, the newspaper was an incredible device for people in a particular.

Speaker 16 And what I think the biggest mistake we all made as journalists was assuming most people subscribed to the paper to pay for news. No.
Most people subscribed to the paper not because of the news.

Speaker 16 It was basically in order to understand what the hell was going on in

Speaker 16 the community, right? Whether it was movie listings, TV guide, coupons, you know, whatever it is, that that was a bigger part of the purchase than I think we journalists want to admit, right?

Speaker 16 And so I think that we have to get out of this phase.

Speaker 16 If we want what we have, the people that want to be informed will always find a way to be informed. The problem in our politics today is that we don't have a way to accidentally inform people.

Speaker 16 And, you know, which is the stuff they would catch. There's this great study that I'm obsessed with.

Speaker 16 It involves newspapers where, and it still worked, which is a couple of college academics did this, you know, saw that there's a correlation that if you get a newspaper delivered to your house, you're more likely to vote.

Speaker 16 So they wanted to say, okay, what if we just force-fed a newspaper to people? Would it increase that group of people's voting?

Speaker 16 And sure enough, it did. They sent the paper to a whole bunch of people that didn't vote in their last election.

Speaker 16 And just the simple act of throwing away the newspaper at least told them when the election was. And those people came out

Speaker 16 in bigger numbers than those that did not receive the paper. So there's something to accidentally informing people that we're missing.

Speaker 16 That's something we've 100% lost because on a national political level, for a while there, you could be accidentally informed of something related to politics from Facebook, but now that or Twitter, if you were one of those people who engaged with Twitter, but now that's a good thing.

Speaker 16 And now they've turned off the algorithm. Right.
So now you don't get that.

Speaker 16 I think you had to get the paper to know what the weather or turn on the local news, to know what the weather was going to be, to know when a movie was, and to know the score of the baseball game right right and in turning on the news picking up the paper you were going to bump into some sort of civic information

Speaker 16 that's why we everyone cared about the headlines right we yes we still fight about headlines all the time but no one cares about headlines anymore because no one looks the paper's not sitting on the news station although you now headlines matter for whether you get a youtube click or not they do matter well they also matter in terms of this is a fight i've back when i was still fighting with reporters that they matter more in the social era than they do because people are only seeing the clip when they scroll But the thing that's interesting now is that because the internet, as we commonly understand it, has collapsed, like for a while, then you didn't either.

Speaker 16 We could find all those things on the internet. But because Google is such a disaster right now because of AI slop and ads and everything else,

Speaker 16 the world has become so much more confusing that you need curated information again, right? Which I think is a lot of what's happening in independent journalism. And I do think that there's a way.

Speaker 16 And again, I think we know consolidation is coming. I just don't know what it looks like on Substack, right? I don't know what it looks like on YouTube, but it's coming.

Speaker 16 And as, you know, that's part of, and, you know, you guys are in some ways, you're planted a flag. And,

Speaker 16 you know, I hope to be a consolidator. That's the bottom line.
More of my conversation with Chuck Todd when we come back.

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Speaker 16 Well, now that you're an independent journalist, I assume you can speak even more freely than you have otherwise about how your former colleagues and the traditional press are doing their job.

Speaker 16 What's your take on how people are covering Trump right now? Are they doing a good job?

Speaker 16 Well, I think it's difficult because

Speaker 16 I just happen to know many of these journalists know they don't have the support of their corporate bosses. And so it is created.
This is real. Okay.

Speaker 16 I'm not going to get into, I don't want to get into names

Speaker 16 for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 16 but it's obvious right they the this is we can feel it right and and the reporters themselves are frustrated because they're not sure it's one of those moments where

Speaker 16 they're gonna they're gonna think and they're gonna look behind them and nobody's following right um you know i'm just

Speaker 16 you know it's come up quite a bit uh the the issue when when myself and jake and a few others you know, were upset when you guys didn't allow Fox into the pool for a Ken Feinberg interview.

Speaker 16 I don't know if you remember that, remember that incident. And I remember one of my motivations,

Speaker 16 I do. Yeah.
And right, but the point is, you know, this is where it's like, I just like, we were genuine in why we were fighting. It was like the shoe's going to be on the other foot, right?

Speaker 16 We, you know, it's inevitable. And so the lack of anybody coming to AP's defense has just been heartbreaking to me.
And watching the AP have to. And are you surprised by that?

Speaker 16 Like, it's not surprising to me that Fox has to come to their defense, but

Speaker 16 there's been no attempt at collective action. None.
And I think the fear, of course, was that the collective action wouldn't matter. And that's, I think, the difficulty here, right?

Speaker 16 You've got a, you've got, it's like, you know, I'm haunted by what the managing partner for Paul Weiss said when he said, look, we, we look for allies and instead they were poaching our clients, right?

Speaker 16 Look at what certain news organizations are doing. They're virtue signaling on saying, well, all right, we'll, we'll, we'll call it.
We'll call the golf, whatever name you want us to call it.

Speaker 16 And you're just like,

Speaker 16 you know, on one hand, I understand that it's your mission, that you're trying to be above this and that you're not trying to get caught into this.

Speaker 16 But, you know, ultimately, the First Amendment's the First Amendment. Look, how they kicked AP out of the pool was the issue.

Speaker 16 Look, they can decide, they can do what they want, but it was, the rationale was clearly unconstitutional. If you can't stand up for that basic principle, then get out of journalism, right?

Speaker 16 Like that should, that is, you know, what hill do you die on? That hill. Die on that hill.
Because if you die on that hill, then it's done anyway, right? Like, what's the point?

Speaker 16 So I've been, I don't think it's fair. And I'll say this, I, you know,

Speaker 16 I certainly think there's been plenty of good individual journalism, but you can feel there's not a comfort level of how do you cover this Trump White House.

Speaker 16 And covering the Trump White House is hard because you know the public stuff is not true. So the best way to report is behind the scenes, which then in itself becomes,

Speaker 16 you end up having to litigate your sourcing and litigate all this. And it's like, so it, it is both a,

Speaker 16 I think it's both easy to report on Trump because everybody does talk,

Speaker 16 a lot of times off the record or on background or stuff like this, but it is hard because of how aggressive the West wing is in essentially trying to exploit the unpopularity of the traditional media.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I

Speaker 16 am.

Speaker 16 Like, this is what would be my take on. I think a lot of individual reporters are doing a lot of very good journalism and they're digging deep, and they're telling detailed stories about,

Speaker 16 you know, the deportation plans or that New York Times story that went, or the 60-minute story that went through all the Venezuelans who were sent to

Speaker 16 the Gulag in El Salvador. Like, there's a lot of very good stuff happening.
There's three problems, I think, with the overall coverage.

Speaker 16 One is, and this is unconscionable, is what the corporate parents at like Disney and Paramount are doing to basically pay off Trump for reasons that have nothing to do with the journalism, but because they have other businesses for the government, which, you know, it's early stages kleptocracy.

Speaker 16 I have a guest

Speaker 16 earlier this week,

Speaker 16 a specialist in this. I mean, you know, people, you know, people on the right get upset at me that I'm using the word, but I don't know how else, what else do you call it?

Speaker 16 That inaugural fund is just that. Yeah, it's pay-to-play.

Speaker 16 We're doing pay-to-play. I mean, essentially, 60, I mean, 60 Minutes, the

Speaker 16 The number one news brand in all of the industry for 50 years is going to, by the end of this period, probably help fund Donald Trump's library so that the owners of the Paramount Corporation can get billions of dollars.

Speaker 16 Like that is what's going to happen. So that's...
Can I just, I don't hate interrupting your thought,

Speaker 16 but just very quick on this, traditional media, you already have alienated the right. Doing this isn't going to help you with the right.

Speaker 16 And all you're going to do is alienate the people that still trusted you. And now nobody's going to trust anything out of those, out of, out of those major traditional media outlets.
It's a huge,

Speaker 16 and can I just tell you,

Speaker 16 individual members of those traditional outlets are seething over this and are demoralized and depressed. And it's across the board, Dan.
Anyway, sorry. Yep.

Speaker 16 And it is, but so this is, and they don't, I don't think the corporate parents care because as the media economics have changed, the amount of money that these media outlets are bringing in for the parent company has gone down, right?

Speaker 16 And they know it is going down.

Speaker 16 They're in secular decline. You know why I'm bitter about this? You know why I'm bitter about this? Because during COVID, we were the only revenue they had.

Speaker 16 And they took our revenue. We all took pay cuts.

Speaker 16 They took our revenue and applied it elsewhere. And then went elsewhere got, yeah, it's time for media to the news divisions have to put on a raincoat.

Speaker 16 But where's, you know, where's the pay it forward? We were there when you had no revenue during COVID, brother. You know, no sports, nothing.
We were the revenue and it did.

Speaker 16 The news divisions generated all this sort of,

Speaker 16 it kept them afloat in certain instances.

Speaker 16 So some of us individually are very bitter about their behavior behavior because it's like they have a total memory loss that this is the whole reason why you are conglomerate.

Speaker 16 Some things are down, but you're going to have some things that are up. And then when some things go down, you have other things that are up.

Speaker 16 I thought that's why you wanted to be a multi, you know, national corporation. Sorry.
Right. It's very problematic.
Okay.

Speaker 16 Second, my second issue with the coverage is what you brought up, that they're not sticking with the AP.

Speaker 16 I understand, and I've talked to some reporters about this, that the fear is that they'll just, there'll be no

Speaker 16 objective journalists in anything. It'll just be a bunch of MAGA people.

Speaker 16 And for the individual reporters, like this is their livelihood. So

Speaker 16 I still believe they should stand up, but I, they're like the calculation is not pure calculation.

Speaker 16 I mean, Republican senators have told me, well, if I'm not there, you won't imagine who replaces me, right? It's the same mindset. Yep.
Yep. And then they just act like that.
That's right.

Speaker 16 But the third thing I think is still a challenge we have is I'm not sure that much of sort of, and I keep using the term traditional because I think mainstream is a sort of a Sarah Palin-esque term that I don't really love, but sort of traditional is the fairest you can do.

Speaker 16 Legacy feels negative too. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 The traditional political press is incapable of telling, like they're very good at identifying the trees in Donald Trump's forest, but they're incapable of describing the forest in appropriate terms.

Speaker 16 Right. To what exactly to talk about what is there are exceptions to this.
There's some people who do it very well. Others do it less well.

Speaker 16 But like we're undergoing a fundamental assault on democracy as we know it. And people are really struggling to describe that in very true ways for whatever reasons.

Speaker 16 And there are cultural reasons, there are professional reasons, there are reasons of self-interest, but the full source of- I think this is the biggest dividing line among the opposition to Trump is this issue that you just identified.

Speaker 16 Because I think, you know, I've always said, you know, the biggest riddle we have to solve in America is there's a 60%.

Speaker 16 majority that would like to have an alternative to Donald Trump. It's, it's pretty, the problem is that 60% can't agree on anything, right?

Speaker 16 And you have about half who believe that this is, we are in an existential moment.

Speaker 16 And you have half that simply believe that, no, the one party has lost their mind and will be able to, quote unquote, revert back.

Speaker 16 And I think that's the tension that you, I think that tension bears out in the press.

Speaker 16 I think you have some in the press that see it as a existential crisis and some that view this as a Republican Party crisis that will go away when Trump goes away. I'll be honest, I vacillate on this.

Speaker 16 I go back and forth. I think the party is a kleptocracy right now.
I mean, just look at how Trump and the meme coins and, you know, hey, you know, if you buy this meme coin now,

Speaker 16 you get money here. So you can't succeed in the Republican Party without paying off Trump.
So that is the beginnings of a kleptocracy.

Speaker 16 Are we Erdogan? No.

Speaker 16 Are we early stages Orban? Maybe. Right.
So that's when I say, I find myself vacillating back and forth. I do think our democracy isn't going to go away tomorrow because I think our local,

Speaker 16 it's too ingrained in so many places. Right.
So that's, I think you've, I always, I feel like that issue is the, is the real tension, even among those that know we're on the wrong path.

Speaker 16 The question is, it's sort of

Speaker 16 very simple. Yes.
Do you, you say you vacillate on it? Do you lean one way or the other? I mean, it seems to me that we are in a pretty bad place.

Speaker 16 Doesn't mean we can't get out of it, but we're the direction we are headed and we are only only 100 days in seems quite concerning.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I'm like more devastated on an international way than I am domestically. Like I can, we heal politically, we can heal quickly domestically.

Speaker 16 I think we've created problems that are going to, internationally, that are going to take a generation to rebuild. And that's, that, that is whether it's trust

Speaker 16 with other countries,

Speaker 16 what we've done to Canada, I think is something that is going to be problematic for beyond one, you know, it's going to take America electing, you know, a Republican president that isn't, you know, a Democratic and a Republican president back to back that is so opposite of Trump.

Speaker 16 You know what I mean? Like it's a minimum decade before we earn the trust back of our key allies. I think we are, he has launched a

Speaker 16 nationalism in a lot of places, right? Nationalism out of survival,

Speaker 16 the way many countries, I think, are going to view this.

Speaker 16 And so I just, so when I, that's when I say I vacillate, I think the damage, I think the damage internationally, I don't think people fully appreciate how bad it is and how long that will take to recover trust.

Speaker 16 I mean, you know, America's been trying to get trust back in Latin America for 50 years and we set ourselves back quite a, you know, every time we take one step forward, there's usually something that puts us two steps back.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 that's how I vacillate because I think domestically we'll recover faster than we will internationally.

Speaker 16 Earlier this month, you were on Chris Alizza, you were talking to Chris Olyza, a fellow slip stacker and podcast host but about that you said that the supposed media cover-up of biden's decline was a right-wing manufactured right-wing premise in order to stain the media i think the idea that the media was covering it up is absurd you know just well that's what i get i am angry about that's what i'm upset about it's the the idea that the media the media is the reason why the public thought he was too old because the media showed you him shuffling every day and the media show didn't have the interviews with him and would tell you the media would show show you that hey he's using the short staircase right you know how is it that fox even had the clips to show right it was the me so and you know now were there pundits on msnbc and cnn

Speaker 16 who

Speaker 16 essentially tried to shame any member of the press that would bring this up yes that was true i mean joe scarborough did this right he was very aggressive as a defender of joe biden whenever it seemed like it was necessary whenever this would pop up but this idea that it wasn't an issue my goodness, Dean Phillips did run for president on this issue.

Speaker 16 Now, there were certain hundreds of people. Reportedly, he did, yes.
Well, I mean, but that's,

Speaker 16 and you're right, like, but I would argue it was, it's the Democratic Party that's responsible for this. They're the ones that do everything they could.

Speaker 16 And this is the party's fault.

Speaker 16 The media is not an organ of the Democratic Party, and there's too many Democrats who wish the media was, and there are too many people in the media who sometimes think that is their job.

Speaker 16 And my frustration is that, look, it wasn't. David Ignatius had a front page column that they put on the front page when they did it, that he shouldn't run again.

Speaker 16 That column ran in the front page of the Washington Post in October of 2023. You know, so the idea that somehow the media was all in cahoots is just nonsense.
Now, I know how this happened.

Speaker 16 You know how this happened. Everybody's personal interaction with Biden was good enough when you thought the alternative was Donald J.
Trump. And

Speaker 16 if everybody had been asked the same question and Nikki Haley was the person standing over there, there would have been a chorus of Democrats who would have said he can't run for reelection.

Speaker 16 There's a tension in what you just said there. And I want to get back to the media conference, but the tension is, did they say that because

Speaker 16 Donald Trump is so dangerous that we can't possibly talk about how old Joe Biden is?

Speaker 16 Or is it because Democrats thought that Joe Biden, Biden, that Donald Trump could be beaten and Nikki Haley could not?

Speaker 16 You know, it's a good question, whether it's about just simply electability or, but I do think the

Speaker 16 I do think that

Speaker 16 it goes to one of Joe Biden's favorite expressions: don't judge me by the almighty, judge me by the alternative, right?

Speaker 16 I think there were plenty of Democrats who were assessing Biden's situation based on,

Speaker 16 well,

Speaker 16 Trump's manic, Biden's slower, okay, they both have issues. issues.
You know what I mean? Like it, it became it became more of a reactionary response.

Speaker 16 Like, my point is, I understand the human, you know, look,

Speaker 16 I don't want to violate an off-the-record, but I had Jeff Zion speak to my, my class of kids a couple weeks ago, and of course, they all asked, and Jeff Zion's answer off the record was the same answer he's given on the record, you know, which is in my dealings with him, Joe Biden was fine, right?

Speaker 16 And if you've noticed, so many people from that West Wing usually word it that way. Well, in my experience, right, it was fine, which, by the way, both things can be true.
Yeah, I guess

Speaker 16 let's put aside whether the media, like there was some room or like, and that's why the reason I'm upset about this is that we know what Fox only wants.

Speaker 16 They're trying desperately to make the media part of the Democratic Party to create distrust in

Speaker 16 legitimate journalists in order to get their problem believed

Speaker 16 by their viewers. So this is why I get my backup about it.

Speaker 16 Right. this is why I get my backup about it.
It's an intentional business strategy that, so what if the truth isn't there? We're just trying to discredit that. And look, I take it as a badge of honor.

Speaker 16 They get obsessed with trying to discredit me because I think they know I have plenty of legitimacy.

Speaker 16 But there is another sort of

Speaker 16 conversation around Biden happening. Alex Thompson of Axios stood up at the White House Correspondence Center this weekend where he won an award for his coverage of Biden's age.

Speaker 16 And he said that essentially that the media had sort of failed here, that they had not done enough reporting on

Speaker 16 Joe Biden's mental capacity up until the, before, prior to the debate. Can you define media? Well, I mean, I think he meant the people in the room.
Right.

Speaker 16 Look, do I think the people in the White House press... Media is my word, not Alex's, as I'm paraphrasing.
No, and that's the thing. Like, you know, this is where...

Speaker 16 And this is where I get, you know, you're sort of like, well, what's the media these days? How do you define it? You know, is it the White House press corps?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I could argue that the White House press corps didn't make this an issue, and they could have. Where's the president today? How come he's not doing a public event today?

Speaker 16 How come he hasn't done a press conference today? You know, there wasn't that.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 I accept that, that that didn't exist in that press room.

Speaker 16 And I think this is where the Biden White House created a chill among reporters, meaning if you dare do that, good luck getting your interview that you were hoping to get with Biden or Harris, et cetera.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 there was a they made it clear there was a price to pay, I think, to some reporters. Yeah, I do think some

Speaker 16 pulled their punches in that press room because they were daily interacting with the Biden press shop.

Speaker 16 Do you think this was ⁇ one of the other contentions out there is that the Democratic Party covered this up. This was a like...
Well, what's there a cover-up? I mean,

Speaker 16 I say this in that, was there a Parkinson's diagnosis that nobody reported on? Do you know what I mean? Like, what's the cover-up? What I would say, forget cover-up.

Speaker 16 It was obvious that he could, it wasn't up for a second term. He himself promised,

Speaker 16 I can't tell you how many people who I've talked to who that were on stage with him when he said transitional president and what they all heard and what they all believe they heard that were standing on that stage with him.

Speaker 16 They all heard one term.

Speaker 16 And so

Speaker 16 I think it's the people in the West Wing.

Speaker 16 You know, look, I had a a cabinet secretary, and I said this on a, after, after the debacle of the debate, because I felt like I could share it, but it was an off the record.

Speaker 16 I had a cabinet secretary who asked me at the end of 22, he can't run again, right? And this cabinet secretary, you know, instead, you know, I said, do you ever get any FaceTime with him?

Speaker 16 He says, nope.

Speaker 16 And it was. It was, you know, and those stories were reported about how cabinet secretaries don't get FaceTime with the president, right?

Speaker 16 They limited the interactions because they wanted to limit the conversations, right? Nobody had it hard that he wasn't available, right?

Speaker 16 It was always just whispers or, huh, he's not, it was what he wasn't doing that turned out to be the evidence, right? He wasn't able to do this or he wasn't able to do that or he wasn't able.

Speaker 16 I mean, the Super Bowl interview, which again,

Speaker 16 plenty of, this is why I'm like, it's not as if it was hidden.

Speaker 16 This is why I take this idea that it's this such this black and white, that the media was part of the cover-up versus never, please, all the conversation around this wow you don't even want to do a super bowl interview is it that difficult are you that concerned right like yeah it was all out there in the ether that's why the fault belongs to the democratic party it's joe biden it's joe biden it's nancy pelosi it's chuck schumer it's ron clain it's jeff science it's everybody that was around him and and you know I do think that it's a weaker defense.

Speaker 16 Like I saw Rahm Emanuel coming out and saying, well, I said, I told people. I don't think that's going to come across very well, by the way.
I don't know if you saw those comments that he made.

Speaker 16 Yeah, there are a lot of people now who are out there saying they told people. Yeah, I did.
I did. A lot of people out there saying they told people.

Speaker 16 The thing that I try to tell people is, based on my many years in Washington, is that Washington, D.C. doesn't do conspiracies.
It only does collective failures.

Speaker 16 And there was no meeting where people decided to get together and do this. It's just a collection of people making the wrong decision over and over again.

Speaker 16 Let me ask you, do you guys feel like you guys should have, should you guys have used your voice more to drive him out of the race? Yeah, we've talked about this. We've talked about this.

Speaker 16 You know, I, I went, I had not, um,

Speaker 16 if I, if I look at myself self-critically, I had not spoken or seen Biden since he called me right before the election. I talked to him, uh, for like five, 10 minutes, and he was great.

Speaker 16 And I interviewed him for the election. He was totally fine.
Like there was no, not even a question there. And I had talked to a bunch of people who had gone to work on the campaign who had told me.

Speaker 16 he's great. And then we get to the White House and I didn't see him again until White House correspondent center weekend 2024.
And he was, it was like, I was at a White House reception and he was bad.

Speaker 16 He was quite bad in it. And he told the same story twice.
And he just seemed mostly old. Not in no way did I look at that and say, that man cannot do the job of president.

Speaker 16 I had real concerns that he could not do it for four more years.

Speaker 16 Right. But he just like, your concern, you look at that, if someone with my perspective is, man, that's a guy who's going to struggle on the campaign trail in a presidential campaign.

Speaker 16 But I also thought to myself, well, it's Friday. This is a super bizarre event the night before the White House Correspondent Center.

Speaker 16 I knew he was coming from speech prep and going back to speech prep on a Friday evening. Even Barack Obama was not

Speaker 16 a great communicator on a Friday evening.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, it's, I trusted the people who I talked to who said he was fine.

Speaker 16 And I also believed, and I said this at the time after the Robert Herb report came out, is that if Biden really was having these like mental lapses all over town, everyone would know it.

Speaker 16 Well, and now you're getting, you know, reporters have to have sources to report stuff. Yeah.
That's another problem, right? Is that you might have a like, boy, this looks one way.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 every time you try to report it out, you got a different answer, right?

Speaker 16 And because he has obviously had good moments and bad moments. Like, do I, you know, I often, my view, we talked a lot on this podcast before the debate about how his age was a huge problem.

Speaker 16 I had a lot of thoughts that I shared publicly and privately about things that he should do to address that. Should I have been more concerned that he wasn't doing them? Probably.
Right.

Speaker 16 Like I can argue, Look, it's all obvious now, you know, and I, and I, you know, it's, you know, I, I, I got ridiculed for even hosting Dean Phillips for a podcast, you know, and yet I was like, oh, great.

Speaker 16 I guess I've, you know, but I was already, look, I was in a weird position. I was post meet the press, so I was trying not to compete with with bookings and other stuff.

Speaker 16 So I was in a weird spot, you know, to not, I was sort of a walking ghost, right? So I had to be, I had to be careful, but it was, you know, it's one of those things where I think news organizations

Speaker 16 were trying to get interviews with the president, and

Speaker 16 you can't tell me that didn't have an impact on what might be said publicly versus what you might know privately.

Speaker 16 Which is so funny because, one, Biden wasn't doing family interviews, and two, it's not like a Biden interview was a giant rating spoon in the way a Trump interview in 2017 was or an Obama interview in 2017.

Speaker 16 And can I just tell you, as a journalist, I hate, no, I know you didn't mean it this way.

Speaker 16 I hate the idea that you think that someone tries to get an interview because they might think it's good. I just want to say that your bosses interview with Joe Biden.

Speaker 16 They may think that. I just wanted a Joe Biden interview because I'm trying to, there's a whole bunch of questions I have for him.
Like, you know, like, I really think most journalists think that way.

Speaker 16 And in fact, are disappointed if other viewers aren't as interested, right? Like, it's more the opposite. They hope viewers are as interested in something as they are.
But anyway, I just, it is,

Speaker 16 a lot of us don't think of the ratings thing first. Yeah, that's fair.
That's fair. I just, I, I, I was not saying there aren't other bookings that are that your network bosses were thinking that way.

Speaker 16 Or the bosses. No, and you're not wrong.
Yeah. Anyone's boss, not just my network, the old network.

Speaker 16 Let's just, because you brought that up, because we talked about presidential interviews. This is him, I thought.

Speaker 16 Do you think, I was watching Terry Moran's interview with Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday night about the 100th day. Do you think it is possible?

Speaker 16 And you've interviewed him, but do you think it's possible to do a good, productive, constructive interview with Donald Trump?

Speaker 16 It all depends on what you're trying to do. I mean,

Speaker 16 I'll tell you you the interview that I never got to conduct with him that I haven't seen anybody do that I actually still want to do with him, which is except, you know, the problem with him.

Speaker 16 So, for instance, the third term nonsense.

Speaker 16 If you ask him, he's going to play with this topic almost the way a cat plays with

Speaker 16 a dead mouse. You know, in fact, I promise you, if I phrased a question like the following to Donald Trump,

Speaker 16 why is Japan a country? How come we don't own Japan? We bombed them. We beat them in World War II.

Speaker 16 You know what Trump would probably say? You're right.

Speaker 16 And you could create a headline. Donald Trump thinks Japan ought to be American territory, right?

Speaker 16 Is he really serious about it? Or is it like the movie Anchorman where he'll accept any premise, so you be careful?

Speaker 16 So I do think there's a responsibility as a journalist that, you know, be careful asking something that feels like a shiny metal object that might make you feel like you get a cheap headline that actually

Speaker 16 isn't really that substantive, like Trump third term. I'm sorry, I just, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not there on Trump third term the way some other people are.

Speaker 16 But here's what I wish would be asked to him and the interview that, which is,

Speaker 16 which is, um, why'd you choke on January 6th?

Speaker 16 So, what I would do is, I think the trick to interviewing Donald Trump is to hand him rope.

Speaker 16 I think the mistake that I've made and many others make is to try to bring him into

Speaker 16 your reality when maybe you're better off helping the viewer see his reality. I like that.
So, you know what this means? Donald Trump, come on Chuck Toddcast.

Speaker 16 You know, I don't think it's a 0% chance. You know how they operate.
You know, I mean, he believes he can handle any interview.

Speaker 16 And if you get, and his staff, if he wants to do something, his staff will never stop him. Yep.
Well, I think that is a great place to end it.

Speaker 16 I would love to see you do that interview with Donald Trump on your podcast. Chuck Todd, thanks for being on Pod Save America.
Great to talk to you as always. It's great to talk to you, Pfeiffer.

Speaker 16 I love it.

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Speaker 18 Our producers are David Toledo, Saul Rubin, and Emma Illich-Frank. Our associate producer is Farah Safari.
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