Mark Leibovich: The Oracle of Washington

It might seem like the 2024 U.S. presidential election is happening in a vacuum, but it will have global repercussions.

All of America's allies are thinking very, very hard about how they should reconfigure themselves in case an isolationist president is in the White House.

Swamp Notes from the Financial Times brings you insights on the race through an international lens.

You can listen to Swamp Notes on the FT News Briefing podcast every Saturday. Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's the weekend.
I got Mark Leibovich Lebo. He's formerly at the New York Times Now he's at the Atlantic.
There are a lot of good people at the Atlantic. He's the author of five books.
His most recent is Thank You for Servitude. And we might talk a little bit about 2013's This Town.
In the green room, we were discussing the Nuggets, Futility, Bob Seger, Office Atlantic gossip. So we're kind of screwing you guys over by leaving everything in the locker room.
How are you doing, Lebo? Great. It's great to be with you, Tim.
We'll come up with good material for the crowd, too. You know, I do have to say, you know, this is the first time you've been on with Charlie first time on with me is when I called the editor, the guy that was going to edit my book, his first question for me was, it's like, what are some political books you like? And my answer to that question was, I pretty much only read fiction.
And like the only political book I've read that I've liked in like the last hundred years is This Town by Mark Leibovich. And he's like, great.
He's like, well, there you go. So you have one model to work for.
And then he gave me five other books that I should read. So now I have to read political books all the time.
It's the burden of this job. And even with that model I had for you, I still struggled until we sat at an Indian restaurant together.
I forget the name of it. You'll know because you wrote This Town.
And you did a diagram on the table for me of how you organize a book. The long and short of it was basically you can organize it however the fuck you want, and the readers will go along with you because you are the god of the book.
And that was like the one piece of advice I needed. So there you go.
So I just wanted to appreciate you for that. Well, first of all, thank you.
And it's great to be with you, Tim. I'm a huge, huge evangelist for not only Tim, but also for your book, Why We Did It.
Why We Did It. I have it right here.
You got it. That's right.
But also the bulwark in general. The bulwark is a minor miracle every day.
Every year I do a kind of um audit of the things i subscribe to online i'm thinking is this worth it and bulwark always like immediately like this is worth it amazing there you go you go to bulwarkplus.com free trial listen to mark levovich get your free trial for bulwark plus i i just cut the athletic yesterday sorry athletic friends i was doing an audit oh i love the athletic. And part of the reason I love the athletic is because ESPN Plus has completely screwed me.
Ever since my email changed from the New York Times, I left the New York Times. They took the email away from me.
I can't get back into my account, and yet I pay for it. And you can't get like a human being.
Anyway, this is like get off my lawn talk. Complain to the credit card company.
You this you yeah you you call the credit card company say screw you disney who owns disney plus disney no i can't get into my account anyway we have some disney listeners somebody give mark levovich his money back all right and by the way this town is not fiction it's non-fiction i mean it's great that you yeah right now you are the counter exception to the rule i was like i only like fiction books except for this town oh i get it we're gonna talk about this town we need to talk about actual we got to talk about the news all right a little bit newsish your most recent piece of the atlantic which are all gems uh gop bozos on campus um house republicans showed up at a campus protest of course that was your actual headline my my my proposed counter headline was gop bozos on campus i love this you're on my alma mater you went to my real alma mater people think i went to lsu i didn't my actual alma mater of gw and um you know i've spent a lot of time too much time according to some people who've provided feedback discussing the gross behavior of some of these protesters on campus with their anti-Semitic chants and their desire for intifada, etc. But I have not spent very much time discussing the gross counter-protesters and the gross politicians trying to take advantage of these people.
And so, this is our moment to do it. Lauren Boebert was there.
People were trolling her with a Beetlejuice sign, apparently. Byron Donalds was getting shouted down by January 6th.
Paint a picture for us at the GW Quad. Were you on the Quad? Yeah, well, the protests were on the Quad.
The press conference presided over by Jim Comer, the head of the oversight committee, was about, I would would say about 100 yards off the quad. It was

mostly just a chaos center. So yeah, so because we are based in Washington, or I am based in Washington, we have, George Washington University has the advantage of hosting a lot of great guests who just sort of come down from Capitol Hill for cheap grandstanding opportunities.
And what better opportunity was there.

I mean, the pretty big encampment of protesters. It's been going on for a while.
Pretty peaceful, pretty chill. I was walking around there before.
I mean, it was the chance for kind of quiet, free food everywhere. I mean, one thing I learned just going there is like a lot of free food.
I mean, pizza for everybody. They they treat the kids well at gw i will say that but don't but you know people were offering like james comber pizza like he was walking by the free food table and everything i think there was a sign that said food like palestine must be free so okay all right you're turning me off from the protesters again all right mark okay the communist protesters this is not you know from each according to their ability to each according to their need this is not winning me over my old republican muscles are flaring a hundred percent i will say this though the pizza was terrific i bet it was donated i don't know who donated it but shout out to whoever that pizza provider was anyway i show I show up.
Comer, Boebert, Donald's, Florida. Crazy.
Luna was there. Sources say she might be crazy.
Wild-eyed Luna. Yeah, a couple of others.
And they were just taking their turns. They were getting shouted down.
Comer kept saying, help is on the way to George Washington University. They're going to shut down these encampments once and for all.
Because while peaceful protest is we're all for peaceful protest this is trespassing and it's time for house republicans to get tough on a trespassing and so that's what they were there for you know they seem a little lighter on the january 6th trespassers that does seem to be a kind of a big conflict there was a lot of real-time heckling back and forth but that's what they wanted i mean they could they had some nice little morsels of um confrontation with the students to go back to fox news with and the whole thing lasted i would say about maybe 10 minutes their little press conference thing then they all could not get back into the van soon enough they were fully protected i mean it was a little chaotic no one's heart was really in it but they got. Did they feel like they had a substantive complaint? You know, do they have any substantive feedback or, you know, thoughts, humanitarian concerns about Gaza? They were worried about anti-Semitism, very worried about anti-Semitism.
Of course, they all went back and voted like against whatever anti-Semitism bill was on the floor that day. But they were very worried about trespassing.
Also, the the safe environment for students i don't think any of them had ever set foot on the george washington university campus before i don't think they'll be back anytime soon it was kind of a hodgepodge of campus protests i mean there was a lot of signs saying you know the there was a big sign that said lesbians for palestine you know trans for palestine a lot groups, a lot of identity politics were represented here. And I do struggle with that.
Yeah, I do struggle with that. I do.
I just, I want, that's great. If you want to be a lesbian for Palestine, I support you.
I would also like for you to be a lesbian against Hamas. Correct.
Because all Palestinians aren't Hamas. That's fine.
And so every sign doesn't have to have Hamas on it. But like one sign, you know, if there's a group of queers for Palestine, protesting Israel, it would be nice if like, you know, maybe there's like an eight to one ratio where eight of the queers were for Palestine and against the IDF or whatever.
And one of the queers was also against Hamas. Just, you know, just to just FYI, we realized that this is not really, they're not really great either, particularly for us.
Correct. And to take that a step further, to credit where due, and I can't believe I'm saying this, Lauren Boebert herself sort of seized on one of these signs or chants or something and said, all right, lesbians for Palestine, or take that to a Hamas rally, see how that goes for you.
You know, fair point. I don't know if that's really credit where due, though, because, I mean, I don't think Lauren Boebert has a long track record of pro-lesbian advocacy herself.
I think that that's probably true. I think it's called concern trolling.
I think that's what Lauren Boebert's doing. Concern trolling.
And you could even say that kids call this concern trolling by whoever wrote that line for her or something.

And they literally each had 30 seconds to talk. And, yeah, it was a little circus.
I kind of figured a little bite-sized morsel of life in Washington circa right now. The only interesting thing about the House Republicans for me at this point, you've been covering these guys for decades, is Mike Johnson.
because like this guy was like pretty indistinguishable from Byron Donald's like five months ago you know in his in his rhetoric and his behavior and his voting habits and he gets in and has managed to like do what all the people pretended they they thought Trump might do grow into the job you know and now when he talks he's like praising Tip O'Neill it seems like him and Hakeem Jeffries have a little bromance now he's like I went into the skiff and things got I don't know if he found you know if God is speaking to him I hope so maybe that is it I'd be happy to credit that but in some ways Mike Johnson's new tone and just showing how easy it is to flip the switch into being a responsible conservative leader actually makes these clowns look even worse in a lot of ways. Does that make sense to you? It does.
I would like to have a hopeful view of him. I do think and I've heard over the years that exposure to the SCIF and to the intelligence, which only a very, very small slice of elected leaders like the Speaker of the House get exposure to, can be an extremely chilling experience.
You see in real time what's at stake, when it could happen, and also to be in the room with the president, to be in the room with other leaders, to be in the room with McConnell, with Schumer, I mean, it's pretty rarefied air. And it's, I imagine, fairly coercive in some ways, or especially when you're the outcast in there, you're sort of seen as the guy who is leading the real clown show.
And look, you're the one impediment to progress here. Can you please go back and do something? It's a little harder to do that when you've been at that level and hearing that.
So I would like to think that he kind of had a little talk with himself and said, okay, I'm going to do the right thing here. There's another part of me that thinks, what is he actually talking to Trump about? Did he actually say to Trump, look, I got nowhere to go here.
It's a bad look for us, for Russia to sort of route Ukraine, Ukraine to be seen as being left out in the cold by us. Can you like, give me a little leeway on this and I'll be there for you on January 6th, 2025 or something.
Cause that's really all that Trump cares about. I mean, I'm sure Trump cares about Russia on some level, but I can't begin to understand that.
I do wonder if you think he's scheming with Trump, how worthy or how reliable a steward of all this Mike Johnson will prove to be when the chips are really down for the country. Yeah.
I just think that whatever he's talking to Trump about is probably as important, if not more so than whatever is going on in his meetings. I'm with you on this, but again, nobody is more surprised than me that this has become a Mike Johnson fan podcast.
And I guess one person is more surprised than me. Mike Johnson's communications director, a former colleague of mine that I ripped mercilessly for years on Twitter when he went toward Donald Trump, Raj Shah.
Oh, so Raj, you're in the White House. Yeah, I saw his name out there.
Yeah. Yeah, Raj is a communications director.
Raj is pretty smart. Well, I've been very harsh on Raj.
I bet, no, I have no doubt. Who used to work for me and then went to work for Trump.
Yeah. And so we haven't talked for years.
Yeah. And he messaged me the other day, and he was like, what's going on? I'm like, I've been telling you for years.
If you do the right thing, I'll say nice things. Like, it's not that hard.
Anyway, here's what Mike Johnson said. I'm going to pull this up in Politico to Ryan Lizza.
The person on the other side of the aisle is not an enemy. They're a fellow American.
The founders anticipated that you have people with very different philosophical ideas, very different principles and ideas about government. But the point was that we would come here, sit around a table and arm wrestle together and kind of get to a point of consensus so that we can govern as a country i mean maybe he's full of shit but like it's a breath of fresh air to go back to a time when we have people that are full of shit talking about bipartisanship i'll take that bullshit i don't know what what do you think about that i i think so too look even if it's just a faint i mean i think first of all, I just want to say that the Reagan-Tip O'Neill friendship thing is bullshit.
Mike Johnson also mentioned this in the same political interview. He said, Tip O'Neill goes to the hospital and kisses him on the forehead.
Johnson said, you know, like they didn't agree on almost anything, but they had respect for one another. I think we got to get back to that.
There we go. Okay.
But you're saying that that's apocryphal? A little bit. They were not close.
They did not love each other. Tip and Reagan.
They were not as close as everyone said. There's this gauzy nostalgia that people look to.
It's like, oh, you can reach across the aisle. After hours, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan would have beers together.
Not really true because Ronald Reagan didn't drink a lot of beer. It happened maybe once.
And the kissing on the head thing, I'd never never heard before I don't know if that's made up how do you do that like you're you're visiting the president of the United States after he's been shot and you kiss him on the head like what why I mean it's cute that I didn't buy that I'm calling bullshit on that we have really we have a really high educated audience and listenership and a well-read listenership so we're gonna have people dig into the the tip tip on the ronnie kiss and we'll report back on monday's podcast about the about the providence of that kiss was there a kiss on the head i mean i am actually old enough to remember when reagan was shot i was i guess like 15 or something like that and i was in my mom's belly okay i mean i maybe a kiss on the head was taking place at uh i guess it was George Washington University Hospital or wherever it was. But larger point, people worked across the aisle, people worked together, which is true.
I mean, there were actual deals that were cut between liberal Democrats who ran the House and conservative Republicans who ran the White House. I mean, there was much more deal making that went on back then.
And look, I want to say Kevin McCarthy is basically a back slapper, too. Right.
His impulse, I wouldn't say is bipartisan, but his impulse is survival. But also just sort of hail fellow.
You know, let's he loves the idea that he and Biden, when Biden was vice president and he was leader of the House leader for the Republican, they used to have breakfast, you know, at the vice and like he was like i remember once he was like showing off pictures of him and biden eating breakfast because he thought that was really cool but you know put put mccarthy aside i yeah i know let's not put mccarthy aside actually i'm very happy you brought him up you spent a lot of time with kevin you did you were in bakersfield with him i was in bakersfield yeah a few years ago he was not speaker yet but he was leader i think another part just psychoanalyzing myself of why i'm so free with praise on mike johnson is the schadenfreude of kevin mccarthy's failure brings me a lot of joy and kevin mccarthy not only was egomaniacal and narcissistic and confident that he was good at what you're just talking about he was a good back slapper he worked his way up from being a car dealer or whatever the fuck he was to being speaker of the house and i'm good at this and i'm and here we have mike johnson replaces him he gets overthrown by matt gates who mccarthy's still leaking against like weirdly out of the speakership he gave a quote to i think politico the other day about how matt gates was doing cocaine and sleeping with underage chicks or something which is seems a little petty so anyway he gets overthrown by matt gates he gets replaced by a simple country lawyer from northwest louisiana who he has no respect for and all of his friends are trash talking him you know and about how mike's in over his head and he doesn't realize how hard kevin had it and then mike within a couple months achieves everything that kevin was totally unable to achieve by employing the simple trick of just like having a basic level of decent treatment of the democrats on the other side like that's really all he did differently and it works and and now kevin is jobless whining having temper tantrums to news reporters and i I get a lot of joy out of that trajectory. I don't know.
I'm not asking you if you get joy out of it, but am I overstating the case here of the fall of Kevin? No. I mean, it's kind of, I don't quite know what he's doing now.
I mean, he seems to have time on his hands. He's talking a lot to a lot of different reporters.
Yeah, this vendetta thing he got against you know nancy mace and matt gates and who else tim birchett all the all people who he feels screwed him i don't quite know where it's all headed whether he has any i mean i guess he's fielding candidates and so forth he call you ever just event no no i mean he's got my number i got his number um no i haven't haven't talked I don't think he likes me. Seems like you picked the right time of night, like after a couple pops are in there, you call him.
I'm sure he'd have a lot to say. You know, sure.
I might try. Maybe tonight.
Maybe it depends. I guess the Nuggets game, after the Nuggets game, I'll do it.
It's going to be on late. I will say this about McCarthy.
He actually, the thing that kind of lost him his job, or seemed to reallyen the loss of his job is he actually did kind of do the right thing on a couple of important things like the debt ceiling. He cut that debt ceiling deal.
He cut the budget deal. He kept the government open.
And then the motion to vacate came after. Now, I'm not saying that, well, he followed his principles and that cost him his job.
So, you know, he's like the second coming of Liz Cheney or something like that. No, I mean, I think what he had that Mike Johnson didn't have was a whole body of bad will that he had accumulated over the years with Democrats, with Republicans.
He just had been around much longer and made a lot more enemies. And you make a lot more enemies when you're in leadership than when you're a backbencher like Mike Johnson, especially when you are considered by your colleagues after like all this chaos and like, yeah, let's give this guy a shot.
So I don't know. I mean, I guess apparently McCarthy wants to work for Trump again.
I mean, it makes sense. I guess he still talks to Trump.
Did you see him like kind of soft float himself for VP in the New York Times? Yeah. Did you see that? Yeah.
He called up Michael Bender. This is why you got to maybe call him after a few problems.
You never know what kind of material he'll give you.

And he's like, you know what Trump needs?

Trump needs a guy that knows his way around the hill.

Yeah.

A guy that he knows is going to be loyal and knows his way around getting it.

It's like, okay, Kevin.

Just like that's what they said about Pence.

But in some world, he could be like a legislative liaison kind of thing or chief of staff.

He could be like a Reince.

Reince lasted

six whole months in that job.

And Reince is running the convention.

Reince is very busy these

days also. Tim, where'd you go? Oh, there you are.

I was pulling up my notes about one of my favorite

columns that you wrote was about

Reince. And

it was, will Trump swallow the GOP

whole? This was in 2016. And you and Reince, what, had like a weekly meeting? Weekly therapy-ish session.
Weekly therapy session. It's interesting.
So this is the summer of 2016, to put people in this spot. It's interesting to think about the comp there, about like Kevin becoming chief of staff versus Reince and how things have changed over the course of the eight years.
Well, I guess Reince did the RNC at that point, but then he becomes chief of staff, but he's the chairman of the RNC. So it's kind of a similar position.
And Reince is so tortured in that role. He literally is hoping for a health event to get out of it.
It's so bad. He was privately telling people, I hope that I have a heart attack, not not one so serious that i will die or anything but just like a little one so i can get out of this and that was the situation with all of those all of my old people they were all so tortured them yeah that's gone now right i mean do you have any republicans doing therapy sessions with you anymore like could you do the rights thing again or everybody's pretty kind of found acceptance on their life as if they're still there right yeah or hiding it's certainly harder to find people to have therapy with you hear less often you just like people are either better keeping their head down or a lot of them have just went away but but yeah 2016 was interesting because you know reintz was rnc chair He was kind of the normie Republican, but also the institutional Republican who had to somehow safeguard the party from this insurgent monster who was just running roughshod, all of them.
And I would go up to the RNC every week and we would talk and Sean Spicer was his communications director there, his deputy, I guess, whatever it was. And we would just sort of sit around and he would say, yeah, it's really.
And he would kind of fetishize his beleagueredness. And it was kind of fun.
And I kind of made him the main character of this piece that ran in the Times magazine. And we kept talking after that.
I remember we spent some time together at the convention that year in Cleveland. And then I was so kind of amused by this, but also kind of amazed by his willingness to continue to kind of unburden himself to me that we did like a brief Tuesdays with Reince column online at the New York Times, in which I would get him to sort of weigh in on the latest Trump outrage week after week.
And he completely played along, at least until someone I think might have gotten to him and said, you know, this might not be the best look for the RNC chair in like August, September of 2016. You might want to stand down for a little bit.
And so eventually, yeah, he kind of shut me down. Was it a self-flagellation type thing? Do you think that he was punishing himself or do you think that he was he thought that he could he could win you over it was a test of his own ability to rationalize or what was he challenging himself or the kink i actually think on some levels he was quite amused by the situation too i think he was kind of flattered by the idea that he was the kind of guy in the hapless job who somehow was the good guy who was trying to be the grown-up here i remember talking to then speaker paul ryan who you know they're pals from wisconsin who said you know i'm glad that reintz is the grown-up in the room like that was the big like scott walker all the whole all the republican like wisconsin kind of group they were all they're all pretty tight that was reintz's job i mean thank thank God we have Reince to sort of do this dirty work.
And yeah, so I think, yeah, Reince was kind of, in a way, he was flattered by that too. And he kind of warmed himself into Trump world and got to be chief of staff for six months, which he's been dining out on for, you know, eight, nine years since.
It's just a life lesson that I always share with college students when they, when I go their class and ask them about my my life career i'm always like if you feel like you're the grown-up in the room where everybody else around you is doing bad shit and you're the one that's like you know trying to keep the rails on the tracks actually that's not a good place like that's it's flattering to tell yourself that that's a good place to be but actually what you're doing is you're enabling and helping the bad people around you. It's a really, really good point.
There's this big parallel between me and Wright's that I wrote about because he basically pitched me on playing his role with regards to the gay marriage. Oh, interesting.
When I worked for him, I was quitting. And I was quitting partly just for careerist reasons.
But a sub reason was gay marriage. I didn't want to be an RNC spokesperson at that time and be like the gay on, on record.
Like, you know, being like, well, on the one hand, the state should have rights. Like nobody wants to be that guy.
And, and me and Ryan's had a big meeting where I told him this. I was like, I'm quitting because of this.
Right. And, and he spent like eight minutes being like, no, we need somebody like you.
You'll make sure our statements aren't, aren't homophobic. You know, it'll be good to keep people in line and to signal that we're not.
And I always looked back on that convo and was like, he took his own advice like four years later with Trump, right? Which is like, we need somebody like me to make the statements a little less crazy. And anyway, he shouldn't have taken his own advice dumb that was autopsy rights right that was like the era that was the era where he was trying to like have a really clear-headed sort of view of like republicans trying to talk like 21st century people i want to talk about your most recent is it your most recent or maybe your second most recent article gavin newsom can't help himself uh yeah i think that was this it was the most recent big one i mean the palestine one was uh that was last week i was quick so you were in sacramento with in sacramento i love california so much i'll even go to sacramento i actually think sacramento is underrated i completely agree sacramento is totally underrated good weather you can get a good meal there and you know it's not it's not paris but like it's it's pretty good it's not i stayed in the bay area though and there was no traffic um i mean everyone leaving california has really helped with the traffic this goes to my first question about gavin i'm of so many different minds about him because in one hand on the one hand there's he has certain traits that you just can't deny like he's good at going on Fox and arguing with the Republicans.
He's compelling.

He was really early on a lot of social justice issues that he was right about, gay marriage

in particular, but some others too.

So you have to give him credit for that.

But also, there are some equally obvious flaws in his personal traits and in how California

is being governed. Every time I read a profile of his his and i was hoping the great lebo would would help unpeel under the onion like does he get his flaws does he see the flaws either in himself or in california and the and the governance philosophy and it kind of seems like no what say you i think he gets the the political vulnerability of california definitely i mean he's lived with that for a long long time i mean he's wanted to he's very ambitious he's wanted to be a national politician for for decades and um you know when you're mayor of san francisco which it has a pretty limited you know traveling purview right i mean it's very very much kind of a bubble world in some ways but you get to kind of find yourself on the national stage all of a sudden with same-sex marriage and he was he was like definitely a pioneer if not the father of same-sex marriage i mean he was the first politician to really boldly go there in a very you know high you know high profile way you know my husband says he will always be with gavin for that because he, it was formative.
I mean, it was, I was a teenager or something that was happening or maybe middle school. I mean, it's San Francisco.
So, you know, in Harvey Milk and like, so within a bit on a national level to be like, I'm going to marry people. Yeah.
Yeah. And well, it's one thing.
Yeah. You can say it's San Francisco, but it also, I mean, that's where the wildfire started.
I mean, that was a national policy, you know, within a few years from that.

And that's where it all started.

So, yeah, no, there were a lot of people like that.

I mean, I think his place in history is assured that way.

Look, California is an easy target.

I mean, I also think there's a romance to California.

And I might just be like some coastal, you know, elite who loves going to California

and loves going to San Francisco and loves going to L.A.

And that's boring.

And, you know, who cares?

You self-identify as the Don Draper, you know, and the Mad Men is like, is like when you're in the, you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know,

you know, you know, you know, that's boring. And, you know, who cares? You self-identify as the Don Draper, you know, and the Mad Men is like, is like when you're on the East coast, it's dreary Mark.
And then you go to California, you have a new outfit. It's like pastels, Mark, you know, the, the filter on the camera is a little different.
Yeah, I wish I don't, I don't actually own pastels, but if I did, I would, I love it. Look, boring.
Okay, who cares? Mark loves California. But so Newsom, he gets California thrown at his face all the time, the homelessness, the crime, the San Francisco, the way it looks, just the whole look and feel of the big cities there.
So he's used to that. I think on a personal level, he definitely has blind spots.
I mean, he is extremely talented. He can be very dazzling.
I think he knows that. And one of the drawbacks to that is it's hard to be a surrogate, which is ostensibly what he is being called upon to be now for Biden.
He's supposed to go out and say, you know, we worship this guy. We think this is the greatest president like ever.
And I am all in for him. I mean, I think he is all in for him because he doesn't want Trump to be president.
But I think it's hard for Newsom to, he's such a performer, it's hard for him to subvert his own performance impulse to that of the greater cause of Biden, because I don't think he at the end of the day really believes it. And I think he believes Biden is better than Trump, but I think he probably also believes he could do a better job making the case.
I'm just attracted to people who are a little bit tortured in certain ways, you know, and he doesn't feel that. I don't know.
Is there any depth there? I think there is. He does go very deep into these issues.
He has this really weird, but I think very compelling way of learning. He had terrible learning disability growing up.
He had terrible dyslexia. He stuttered.
He got terrible grades and terrible SAT scores. And he had to really learn to process written material in a different way.
He did a lot of memorizing. He kind of learned to be a consumer of information as a performer, which, yes, you can say that there's lightweightness behind that because he doesn't spend hours upon hours upon hours reading stuff but look i mean he masters a lot of the bullet points a lot of the main points and look when you're on tv it's obviously a big asset but he also he does the work he works extremely hard he stays up extremely late and does he actually care about the social justice because that's the other thing that i see that i wonder sometimes it's like you're doing the interview with them and you'll ask him a question that's kind of personal.
And, you know, and he'll be like, well, you know, I just, I do care about the plight of the whatever group. You know, in a way that sometimes feels a little phony.
Can't speak to his level of sincerity, however. You kind of can.
No, you're an observer of the human condition. I am an observer, but there are limits to observation, you know, as far as one's inner, you know, commitment.

I think he can certainly sound like he cares. You know, it's kind of what politicians need to do, first of all.
I mean, I think so. I mean, he legit was pretty badly bullied growing up.
I mean, he definitely has had a lot of vulnerabilities in life that I think would make him or make someone like him more appreciative of what it's like to be beaten around a little bit and maybe have someone have your back. Again, very easy to be cynical with him, and I am, and I think many people can be.
I think it hurts him. He appears very showman-like, very – he looks like an operator.
He looks like kind of a short timer, someone who's just sort of blowing through and on his way to the next thing. But I find him effective.
I find him somewhat sincere. And look, I mean, politics is, it's largely about, you know, what you can get done and what you can get away with.
And, you know, he's obviously had a pretty long career at this point.

So, yeah. Did you ask him about the picture? Which one? Him and Kim Guilfoyle laying on the rug together.
Oh, I didn't ask him about the picture, but we certainly talked about Kim. Yeah.
Kim Guilfoyle, his first wife, and who's now the future wife of Donald Trump Jr. So if Newsom does run for president, as I think he probably will in 2028, and Don Jr.
runs as the heir to his father's legacy in 2028, assuming elections aren't canceled. I think it's actually more likely that Donald Trump Sr.
will still be running again. Probably.
Okay, take the leap of faith and say Jr. actually steps in.
You will have an unprecedented situation in which both the Republican and Democratic nominee have been married to the same woman. I don't think that's ever happened.
I mean, I don't think Mondale and Reagan were married to the same woman. I mean, I'm not a historian, so I can't speak to like the 1800s or anything.
But I mean, Kim Guilfoyle would become the most interesting woman in America like instantly. That's one reason not to hope for that is because the last thing we need is Kim Guilfoyle to become one of the most favorite people in America.
I was just doing a quick Google to see if we have any other examples of this, and I'm not seeing anything. I was pulling up the 1876 election, Hayes versus Tilden.
They came from Ohio and New York. I don't think that there's a lot of overlap there yeah i think adley stevenson was dating mamie eisenhower for a bit but i don't think they ever were married yeah got it sorry to the eisenhower library i'm kidding all right fine if you can't be a psychologist you can be an observer of people's political talent and so like where do you fall on get could gavin really be the nominee like do you think that gavin's got it or is he is he more of a desantis or more of a reagan uh he's not a desantis and he's not a reagan i mean reagan i mean had much more sort of stage presence frankly he was much less in a hurry he played a long game he was he'd been at that a while and he was a trained actor and but he's not desantis i i mean he first of all he hates de santos the two of them genuinely hate each other which is kind of fun the interesting nugget in your piece actually was when they did that debate was the off stage yeah gavin it says a lot about both of them right gavin tried to like be chummy do the deal um and and de santos wouldn't talk to him he said he put his hands in his pocket i had no idea if he would would talk out of school about what happens backstage.
Because I don't want to talk about private discussions. But he had no problem with that.
He had no loyalty at all. There were no desire to protect DeSantis.
Yeah, no, he did a great kind of imitation of DeSantis' posture, just kind of looking right at his shoes. Someone had sent Newsom a bottle of wine called DeSantis wine.
Sour? Well, he didn't open it because I asked him, I said, so are you still drinking, Governor? Because he stopped drinking for a while in the late aughts, I guess. I think he still partakes of wine, but he said, you'll notice that the DeSantis wine was unopened.
And it was, but I have a picture of the de santis wine in newsom's office

one other thing from your interview that ties to to a different subject i want to get to which is biden is the age issue came up and i guess newsom made a joke about prevagen yeah and that got you into a pretty awkward exchange it felt like yeah it was awkward but it's good for the story i mean basically newsom was was doing his uh biden is fdr biden is jfk i've never seen a greater leader kind of thing blah blah blah and i said well you know if you look at these polls if you look at biden's polls in addition to his low approval ratings and if you look at you know the concerning head to heads with Trump, voters in both parties and independents overwhelmingly think that Biden shouldn't be running at this age, isn't age at this point, just the intractable issue for him. And I thought he was going to just sort of like, say something like, yeah, no, no, Biden has never been more vigorous.
He's great and everything. But no, he said, maybe we can get him some Prevagen or something.
And I didn't know what Prevagen was. Newsom pronounced it Predagen with a T.
But it's, I guess, one of those vitamins or, I don't know, extracts that promotes brain health or something like that, that advertises on Fox a lot, which Newsom watches all the time. So he was familiar with Prevagen.
And I was not because I don't watch Fox, but I very sarcastically said, well, do you think that someone should, you know, maybe put the president on a more vigorous notion of Prevagen? At which point I thought Newsom would realize that, hmm, maybe I've gone out a little over my skis here and I shouldn't be joking about, you know, the president of the United States, you know, taking this anti agingaging or pro brain health kind of supplement. And then he kind of dissembled his way through that.
And, you know, I heard this and I was thinking, oh, well, one, make sure the tape recorder is working and two, that'll be in the lead somewhere. I don't think the White House loved that exchange, but it was big on Fox.
Jesse Waters was a big fan of that. The Five had a whole segment on that apparently.
Well, this episode is sponsored by Prevagen which is formulated with Apochorin which was originally discovered in jellyfish. It's safe and unique and supports brain function.
Jellyfish? Yeah, we're not actually sponsored by them but yeah, that's what it says right here. Prevagenagen.com.
Jellyfish. That's kind of brain-eating, it sounds like.
Yeah. Well, the jellyfish are very smart.
Octopus? Very smart. Very sentient.
I know. Yeah.
Have you ever been bitten by a jellyfish? No. Jellyfish, they really hurt.
That really, really hurts. They can also be fatal.
I was in Florida last year, and I stepped on a jellyfish because I didn't believe that, like it's a big blob of jelly how much damage did it do and it did damage that's kind of your hand on the stove moment at age 52 definitely yeah although actually it's funny i i think i had a hand on the jellyfish moment when i was like five or so so maybe that moment only works for 50 years maybe i needed a reminder it was a booster shot of you know having religion on jellyfish. I had a smooth transition until we got off into octopus and jellyfish, but I want to talk about your original Biden story on this age.
June 16th, 2022. Why Biden shouldn't run in 2024.
You're arguing mostly that it was about the fact that he'd be 86 at the end of his administration said in recent weeks you spoke with 10 official and unofficial advisors asking them about how he's holding up and uh what kind of what kind of responses were you getting back then and how do you think that article is holding up here may 10th 2024 yeah i mean i i stand by it i did i break the story that biden is old i don't i I don't know. I mean, kind of actually kind of,

it was,

I was talking with Ben at the time for something that I was working on.

Like he was calling you like the dam is broken.

Once the Oracle of Washington,

Mark Leibovitch,

who is,

who is wind and dined at the Washington parties.

And it was the scribe of the town.

Once he says it,

now people can talk about it.

So,

you know,

in some ways,

some people thought that you kind of opened up the,

So, let know, in some ways, some people thought that you kind of opened up the convo, which I'm sure some of our listeners don't appreciate. Yeah, no, they really don't appreciate it now.
I mean, I've written subsequent stories to the same theme. I mean, I think others have, obviously.
Look, I think he's too old. I think he shouldn't have run.
I think a lot of people think that. But I think at this point, that chip sails.
He's the candidate that can beat Trump. So his one job is to win.
I mean, you could argue that his one job was to win in 2020, and he did that job. And, you know, anything he's accomplished as president has been gravy.
And, you know, he brought calm to the nation and non-chaos to the nation.

But no, I think still it's a huge problem.

And it has shown to be a huge problem in poll after poll after poll no matter how taboo the subject might be now around the white house and and yeah people get pissed off at you all the time pissed off for mentioning it but i mean it doesn't make it any less true now just given that die is cast. When you're talking to people around Biden, I mean, so you still live in Washington, you know, you're still at this town, man, not like me, I've decamped out to real America, you know, the Caribbean.
Are there things that they say that you can't, they can't make it into the Atlantic because of editors that can make it into a podcast, you know, where we have lighter, you know, lighter rules on sourcing? what are the what are the vibes from the people that you talk to on this that are in his circle incredible nervousness yeah i mean i can't i can't name names um no it's like you hear the same nervousness around the white house around the the dnc around the re-elect about his age you know the state of the union was i guess a good moment for him but but he still looks old. People will say that, and they will say that, even people who see him on a fairly regular basis.
That's a problem. That's a fact.
He might win anyway, but yeah, it's something they continue to deal with. I think it really, really helps that Trump has been such a gobbler of attention, And Biden has been, you know, very much the second candidate in this race and very much in the background.
Hopefully he doesn't step out of jellyfish. I guess my pushback is the one counter when I think about this.
I shared concerns about Biden. I just wasn't sure that the alternative was any better.
And I still not. Because, you know, I just imagine this Gaza situation, which is just a total, you know, problem for him, a conundrum for him as it is as the president.
But imagine if he's the lame duck president and there's a Democratic nominee who is trying to either angle to his probably to his left. Who the hell knows? You know, if it's Kamala.
I mean, that would have just take what is already a cluster and make it a cluster of epic proportions. So I don't know that the alternative was much better, I guess.
I don't disagree. I was definitely comfortable saying, uh, he's old, he's too old making that argument.
I was less comfortable saying yes. And if they nominated so-and-so, um, you know, that so-and-so would win and everything would be fine.
It'd be a Reagan Mondale. Right.
I mean, I don't think Kamala is a so-and-so. I don't think Newsom's a so-and-so.
I think if you look at polling like Whitmer, none of them do any better than Biden usually. Although I'm also of the belief that a vigorous campaign in which Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro and Raphael Warnock and Gretchen Whitmer were running you know, a winner was anointed.
I mean, you can't, I mean, that is a very, very enlightening process and definitely an elevating process if you can get through it, obviously. You were out with Nikki Haley a lot on the campaign trail.
What do you think she does? She's been quiet. Yeah, it's a great question.
It's a wild card. I mean, I'm surprised she hasn't just sort of folded her cards and just said, I endorse President Trump.
It's very important that we have his policies and Biden is terrible and blah, blah, blah, like done what Sununu did and what I guess DeSantis did. I mean, DeSantis, it's been kind of clunky, but I guess they had a detente recently.
I don't think she's holding out for some deal with Trump. I don't think she said, you know, look, make me secretary of state.
I mean, that's not going to happen either. The only thing I can sort of say is I think the longer she holds out, the worse it is for Trump, which feels obvious.
But I think as we've seen in these numbers in the primaries that have happened after she's dropped out, this still seems to hold quite a bit of sway with her voters or her potential voters, either as a place for protest Republicans to go, or at least, you know, this is kind of a cliche at this point. I don't like this word, but I'm going to use it anyway.
A permission structure. Don't you think that's a bad word? Is that a nag on Sarah Longwell? She loves talking about permission structures.
You're right. I love Sarah Longwell.
I do too. No shade intended at all.
there are people that you love that sometimes use annoying phrases that happens for me sarah has become so influential and so widely listened to that she has made permission structure a cliche so that that is a sign of her power and the awe in which i hold her so anyway haley's staying in staying kind of on the outside has been helpful. I mean, I would love to think, and I guess Jonathan Martin wrote this a few weeks ago, I would like to think the White House is reaching after her in some way.
I don't know if the Trump people are. I mean, they should, but she can certainly be a bit of a power broker, you know, if non-Trumpy Republicans are a wild card in this.
I agree that i promised that we'd end with some nostalgia so we're going to start in the 80s okay with kind of like a an angel and devil nostalgia jack quinn died recently of the quinn gillespie power firm unfortunately still with us paul manafort of of manafort and stone yeah is back in the picture big washington post story about today, about being poised to rejoin Trump's world and he did a deal with a Chinese media company, which is, I'm sure, totally on the up and up. I want you to take us through that kind of 80s, 90s lobbyist corruption heyday, and then we're going to do a little This Town era and take us to present day.
So talk about Quinn and Manafort and that side of the Washington swamp. Yeah.
So Jack Quinn, who died this week at I think 74, 75, he was in his seventies. He was a minor character in this town.
He was the general counsel or the white house counsel for a brief period under Bill Clinton in the nineties. He was tied up in the Mark Rich scandal, which feels very quaint in retrospect.
So Mark Rich was this financier who had some criminal problem and was a fugitive. He was in Europe somewhere.
And Clinton pardoned him at the 11th hour, right before he left office. Jack Quinn was Mark Rich's attorney.
He was seen to have kind of brokered the pardon. And there was a few weeks of pretty, you know, there was hell to pay for this.
I mean, it was like, wow, what a terrible abuse of the pardon system. And like, how could Bill Clinton do this? And the guy just left the White House and they treated it as a real crisis.
And it kind of was for a while. Of course, you know, Trump has made like a, like orders of magnitude, greater mockery of the pardon system than anything Bill Clinton ever did.

But so Jack Quinn, who I interviewed a bunch of times for this town, he taught me the expression,

you're going to have your time in the barrel. Because after Mark Rich was pardoned and he was

Mark Rich's lawyer, someone said to him, I forgot who it was, you're going to have your time in the

barrel, Jack, and you're going to come back. So Jack felt great shame for a while.
He was was getting terrible press he was seen as corrupt for somehow brokering this and this is how washington works he eventually um started a a pretty significant and pretty well-known lobbying firm with ed gillespie who was a longtime republican operative rnc chair uh worked in the bush white house where's ed gillespie by the way i'm gonna start adding him to my list of people that are I don't know where to my list of people that are just so cowardly. Could Ed Gillespie be for Joe Biden? What's he doing? Where's Ed Gillespie? He ran for governor or something, failed in Virginia, and was always one of the quote-unquote normal Republicans.
Just add him to the list of the MIA. Put him on a milk carton.
Anyway, sorry. I had forgotten about Ed Gillespie.
Sometimes these names come up, and I like, fuck that guy too, actually. Where are all these people? Anyway, sorry.
Go ahead, Mark. Continue.
But it was a classic sort of, okay, here's the RNC. Here you got your Clinton guy and here you got your Bush guy.
And they're teaming up and like both their names are on the building, Quinn and Gillespie. And boy, they're bipartisan.
It isn't great. They can get things done.
So Jack, I remember talking to him once, and he taught me another expression, which is now much more commonly in use, which is the thing about Ed that I liked at Gillespie is he got the joke or he gets the joke. And I'm like, what do you mean? What is the joke? He said, you know, the joke that like, you know, I might be a Democrat and he might be a Republican, but we all kind of get the joke.
Meaning at the end of the day, it's all about the green party, the green party being money. So that's kind of the joke here.
And I was like, oh, well, all right. So I had all this umbrage and outrage.
And that was kind of the whole theme of this town, which is this is kind of this one party system here, which is dedicated to everyone getting rich and people getting elected and never leaving and, you know, just leveraging their public service for some kind of self-service, usually financial in nature. And of course, that was 10 years ago.
And then I then Trump came in. And in a weird way, I have this kind of gauzy nostalgia, you know, pseudo quasi like, wow, that was what the outrages looked like then.
And, you know, Trump has just turbocharged the outrages of the swamp and self-dealing and corruption so the question though then that i grapple with is okay yeah obviously that stuff seems like small potatoes compared to you know the end of american democracy that said like are we just all so self-obsessed and myopic that we think that everything that we did played a part in this but actually it was global forces or did it kind of play a part like did the phoniness the getting the joke the oh oh i'm a republican i'm a democrat and we're going to pretend like we're on different sides for the you know cameras but actually we're all on the same team did that like contribute to trump and like give him this sense of authenticity and like give him the the oh you guys are the uniparty talking points that allowed him to merge and so in that way yeah sure maybe the corruption was not quite as great but like the consequences were very serious oh 100 i mean like trump ran against that i mean that was the whole drain the swamp circa 2016 thing i mean it's a joke in retrospect given what how he purified paul manafort's back given that paul manafort was like the fucking king of the swamp the swamp creature you could go down the list right but um no i mean he very deftly ran against that he ran against like look these guys are all weak clowns i can totally roll over these guys which of course he proved to be true in the republican party i mean he found the right party to roll over because he could have been a democrat i mean i guess he was a democrat so people have been running or presidential candidates have been running quite effectively against the one world government of of dc i mean obama was like we're going to change this i don't hate republicans you know it's there's not a red god or whatever that line was at his keynote speech. I mean, we're all.
There's no red states. There's no blue states.
There's all the United States. There's no red states or blue states.
Yeah, we're all like. Bush was like, yeah, I come from Texas.
I mean, the whole outsider trope. But Trump was much more forceful in this.
These guys are phonies, and I'm going to totally like stomp them. And that very compelling i mean very unsubtle but it was

compelling and it was obviously complete bullshit but it worked and that's what he did i have one more nostalgia for you you wrote in 2012 that that presidential race willard mit romney versus barack obama was quote the most joyless of your lifetime yeah is there a life lesson we can take from that,

you know,

perspective,

gaining perspective on things.

Is there a life lesson you take from thinking that 2012 was joyless?

It's embarrassing that I wrote that.

I mean,

look,

it's my whole life is embarrassing things that I wrote in 2012.

So,

okay.

So just welcome to the club.

All right,

leave it.

I hear you.

I hear you.

I mean,

it does speak to the wisdom of age and it's all relative now as we head into

Thank you. club all right leave out i hear you i hear you i mean it does speak to the wisdom of age and um it's all relative now as we head into what i think will be i think joyless is probably a pretty innocent way of talking about what we might have in store for the next few months i'd love for it to be joy i mean i would like for the end to have joy but for it to be merely joyless would be a gift i think it's going to be much more grotesque than that.
Could be, yeah. I mean, it sounds likely.
It would be nice if it ends well, though. It would be.
Speaking of joylessness, Celtics lost last night. Nuggets are down too well.
We were planning a hang. I don't know if you know about this yet, but I was mentally planning a hang for game one in Boston because I would love to have seen the Nuggets in the garden.
We talked about that, or we talked something similar. Yeah, it's not out of the question.
It doesn might be happening not out of the question not out of the question i mean the nuggets need to win tonight by the way complaint to the nba why such a gap in the nugget series this is actually the one series i cared about other than the self it's actually the the knicks uh series is interesting too but you know i thought we had like a one day gap but now it's like when was the last nuggets game tuesday and now it's friday or something like that come on monday yeah we needed the four days hopefully jamal murray's calf gets better okay hopefully it's not a joyless night thank you mark leevich by popular demand by specific request actually by a future guest um we've brought in lebo back to the podcast so good to hang with you you. The scribe of the swamp.
I've thought about what our weekend

song is. You're going to have to listen to the end of the episode

to find it out yourself. Oh, I can't wait.

It won't be Bob Seger, though. Please come

back again soon. Anytime, Tim.

Love being on. Thanks to Mark Leavitch of

The Atlantic. Subscribe to The Atlantic.

Go get his books if you haven't, and we'll see you back here

on Monday with Will Salatin.

Will Salatin Mondays are back because

Bill Kristol's on vacation. We'll see you all then.
Peace. Now let me tell you a story that Emily has a plan a bag of bones in his pocket get anything you want no dust, no rocks.

The whole thing is over.

All those beauties, in solid motion.

All those beauties, they're gonna swine on you.

Let's go. I was so fine The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brow.