Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
Alex Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and the co-author, with Jake Tapper, of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alex Thompson discuss when Biden’s mental state first became concerning, the cover up, and the motivations of Biden’s team and of other members of the Democratic Party during that period.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: When did you start to feel concerned about Joe Biden's mental state?
Alex Thompson: It was late 2021. I wrote a story about it at the time. Joe Biden has been in Washington since 1973, and he was the easiest quote in town for many of those decades—to the point that reporters, when they would see Joe Biden, would walk the other way because they knew that if they asked him a question, he would talk for 45 minutes. And yet, by the end of his first year as president, he had given fewer interviews and fewer press conferences than any president of the modern era in many decades. It was really stunning. I think by the end of the first year, he'd done just around a dozen, maybe a little over a dozen interviews with reporters.
He is the first president, maybe ever, but certainly in decades, to never have done a sit-down interview with reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or even Reuters. And that, to me, was telling—they were protecting him. I still remember—it was this offhand moment—when Press Secretary Jen Psaki mentioned in a podcast with former Obama aide David Axelrod, I think she maybe let her guard down, but she said that often they counseled him not to answer reporters’ questions. And I thought, that’s interesting—what shifted?
So that was one of the first stories. Clearly, they saw it as a political issue, and I wrote about that a bunch. But when I actually started being like, huh, maybe something's actually off—it was because the Biden team would say, well, you know, this is actually a new media strategy that you don’t understand.
Mounk: That's how Donald Trump made it so big and why Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the country. Which would be fair, if instead of talking to Axios and CNN they were talking to a lot of new media outlets, right?
Thompson: A hundred percent. Does The New York Times and ABC News matter as much as it did 30 years ago? No, it doesn’t. But it wasn’t like they were having him do three podcasts a day, either. They would occasionally have him do one to sell this narrative that it was all part of a strategy. But the reality was, it was because he had limitations now. He could not do what he used to do. Then, obviously, it vacillated between, this is a new media strategy, or, he has a stutter, it’s a lifelong stutter. They were sort of insinuating you’re ableist if you’re asking questions about this. And those were their two main go-tos.
I’d say the second moment when I became concerned—and this was more investigative—was in early 2023. I think it was not the inner-inner circle, but when the rungs right below it realized that Joe Biden was actually going to do this—that Joe Biden was going to run again—they became concerned. That’s when the first real leaks to me started coming. They saw that it was very difficult, both publicly and privately, to schedule any events outside the 10am to 4pm window. It wasn’t a strategy—it was his energy. These people thought in their heads, he can still be president, but they did not believe—or at least they had serious concerns—about him being president until January of 2029, and his ability to really do a reelection campaign, which is exhausting. Now I’m giving you a Joe Biden–esque long answer, but those were the two moments.
Mounk: You sound a little more coherent—don’t worry. You did write about this early on. I guess what strikes me about this whole story is the vast distance between how most voters felt and how insiders perceived the situation. Which is to say that even by the time Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, it was quite obvious from his performance in debates, from his appearances on Zoom, that he wasn’t the same man he had been 20 or 10 or even four years earlier. Now, that didn’t mean that at that point it was in any way obvious that he had a very strong form of mental decline. I’m not sure that he did in 2020. But I think a lot of people already felt that there had been a change. And a year or two later, it had changed drastically.
I remember sitting in an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival—of all things—in what would have been the summer of perhaps 2022. Karl Rove asked the audience: do you like Joe Biden? Nearly all hands went up. Do you think he’s doing a decent job? A lot of hands went up. Do you think he’s too old? Nearly all hands went up. Do you want him to run again? Nearly no hands went up. So even an audience that was very well-disposed towards him had a visceral sense—by at least the summer of 2022—that he just didn’t have it in him for another four years, and that he had—whatever medical term you want to put on it or not put on it—aged in ways that made it very hard for him to be president, or to continue to, certainly, be president for another four years. Yet the more you ascended the scale of access and the scale of prestige, the less people seemed to be talking and writing about that. You went to your local Democratic Party neighborhood association—people probably talked about it quite openly. You had lunch with a bunch of New York Times writers—people probably didn’t talk about it.
Why did that cognitive distance emerge between ordinary people—who had quite limited evidence to go on but who, largely, I think called it correctly—and people who had more access, more ability to ask others about what was going on, more ability to be exposed to him, who somehow seemed to have only realized this later?
Thompson: That's such a great question. I'm going to word vomit at you because I have a few different thoughts—because I saw the exact same thing. I remember when The Wall Street Journal published their big story. People forget this. Their big story about Biden’s age was three weeks before the debate. Not only did the entire Democratic Party publicly attack them, but a lot of fellow reporters also threw shade publicly and privately. I remember the headline on that story was something like, behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping. And my reaction was: Behind closed doors? I remember saying that to other reporters. I saw exactly what you're describing—this discomfort, like, we don't talk about that. There was this embarrassment. I think part of it is the access game. The more access you get, the more you're willing to defend the people who are giving you that access. Or to believe them—also because everyone in the Biden White House who had regular access to him was not telling the truth. I intentionally don’t use the word “lie,” because I do believe it gets into motives that you can’t know. Was it self-delusion? Was it impersonal, intentional covering up? Regardless, I think it’s fair to call it deception, given the ways they orchestrated things to keep him from looking old.
I also think there’s an old expression—I think it’s attributed to former Senator Gary Hart, a Democratic senator from Colorado, but I’m sure others have said versions of it—which is that Washington is always the last to get the news. My entire time in Washington since 2013 has proven that to be true, over and over again. This is just the latest example of it.
As local news dies, as national media becomes increasingly concentrated in D.C. and New York, it does seem in some ways that the disconnect grows. But even with voters who were obviously very concerned—I do think everyone saw that he was in decline.
The extent of the decline, I think, was fairly well-hidden. If you read the book, the Biden that we saw on the debate stage—that wasn’t even the first time he acted like that behind closed doors. It wasn’t even close to the first time he acted like that behind closed doors. He had moments that were similar.
Mounk: Well, one of the things I found really striking in the book—which I hadn’t quite understood about the story before reading it—was how few people had any kind of access to Joe Biden himself in the last two or so years of his presidency. It was obvious that the White House was limiting occasions on which Biden would appear in public. It was obvious that he wasn’t performing great in those—but many of them were so scripted that, beyond having just a very clear gut reaction that this is not the Joe Biden we’d seen in the past, it was hard to assess—until the debate—the extent of his public decline. I was early on the record saying that Biden should not run again, that there were very obvious problems with his mental state, but I probably underestimated the extent of the problem, in part because you assume: behind closed doors, he must be meeting with all these people. And it’s interesting—even if you didn’t want to write about the extent of his mental decline—that there were so few stories in the media about how the average Democratic senator hadn’t spoken to Joe Biden in two years.
There are all these amazing quotes you got from people who saw the debate in June 2024, or had some kind of meeting with him around that time, and they’re gobsmacked by what he’s like—because they haven’t laid eyes on him in two years. And these are not the chairmen of a Democratic Party in some county that only matters when there’s an election coming up. These are United States senators—really powerful people in the party.
Thompson: Yeah, cabinet members too. We had one cabinet member who basically said that almost all access to members of the cabinet was shut off beginning in late 2023. One cabinet member told us that they had this meeting in 2024—a rare meeting—and they were stunned. They described exactly what you saw on the debate stage: slack-jawed, meandering, completely off-topic. Also, we had a senior White House official—and honestly, I still remember that moment. Because when Jake Tapper and I decided to write this book, it was just a hunch. It was on November 6. We were like, there’s more to this story about Biden—let’s try. So we pitched it, not knowing what we were going to get.
I remember this one interview very simply—this senior White House official, one of those people I’d tried to talk to forever but who never responded—this person, who left in 2024, confessed that they left because they thought it was irresponsible to run for reelection. They also confessed that the top aides in the White House were intentionally shielding him—not just from voters, but from senior members of the Democratic Party and senior members of his own administration—so they could not see the extent of the decline. They would try to only show him at his very best moments, which often took place in the middle of the day.
Mounk: One of the great things about the book is that it's a really compelling narrative and that makes it a great read. I think you're, understandably, very careful about making judgments and imputing motives to people, because that’s hard to do. But it is one of the questions that any reader of the book is going to ask themselves, right? Presumably we can divide people up into a few categories. Off the top of my head, one category is: fully aware of the fact that Joe Biden is in serious mental decline and working to obscure that fact. The next is: in denial about the extent to which that’s the case, but still complicit in “protecting” Biden from too much public scrutiny because they're worried about it. Then you get to: somewhat concerned about it, but as much lied to as lying. As much allowing yourself to be talked into: well, I sort of have a bad gut feeling, but I guess everybody’s telling me it’s fine, so I guess it must be fine. I’m going to slightly overstate my confidence about that when I’m in front of voters. Then the true believers, who are just like: Any concerns about Biden’s mental health are just a Fox News conspiracy—this is all ridiculous.
Who falls into which of those categories? We don’t have to go name by name. But who were the people you think did know what was going on—and when they looked in the mirror, they knew what they were doing? And who were the people who fell into some of the categories that were further in the direction of delusion, self-delusion, extreme naivety—whatever you want to call it?
Thompson: Honestly, I’m going to dodge your question a little bit, not because I don’t have thoughts, but because I agree with what you’re saying: you don’t want to put intention into people’s minds. But I will say—and I’ll try to answer it the best way I can—that the people who saw Joe Biden the most, and I am going to name their names, would be Bruce Reed, his top policy advisor, Steve Ricchetti, both his friend and top legislative advisor, Mike Donilon, his top political advisor, Anthony Bernal, the First Lady’s top political advisor, and Annie Tomasini—a kind of traveling chief of staff, who managed him in general.
These are all people who’ve been with Joe Biden for a long time. These are the five most powerful people in the White House. They all live and die by their loyalty to him, by his praise. If you go to the next layer out, you have people like Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Anita Dunn—and honestly, there aren’t that many others in that second category. Maybe those are people who aren’t ride or die Biden people. Their entire political careers are not connected to Joe Biden, but they still had significant access. You could argue, as a result, that maybe they should have known better. But they didn’t have the same level of influence with the principal, because of the fact that they aren’t ride or die Biden.
Now, to answer your question, if you want to give people the benefit of the doubt, there is one rationale, especially for that inner-inner circle, and even for that second circle I talked about. One is: if you believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything. And that’s what they were doing. They were saying, Joe Biden would be a better president at 86 years old than Donald Trump would be. If we change anything up, we are making that potentially more likely. I remember that someone who had talked to Jeff Zients, the Chief of Staff, said: OK, if you’re Jeff Zients, what are your options if you don’t think Joe Biden should run? You could confront him privately—which I think the book very clearly shows almost nobody did, with the exception of Tony Blinken. Even his was kind of a light touch. You could go public—but that’s the nuclear option. Nobody thought they were going to change his or the family’s mind about running. It was only going to hurt Biden politically, and help Trump. So that’s the generous version: the specter of Trump.
The less charitable version is that they all had their own self-interest in keeping Joe Biden in the White House monetarily, and in terms of their own significance and their own power. If you're ride or die for Biden—especially that whole crew—this was going to be the capstone of their career. They were talking themselves into something, putting this guy in the Oval Office for four more years, because it was in their self-interest.
Mounk: A lot of inner circles also had children, nephews and whatever else working in the administration. So there was another layer of self-interest in a rather strange way. Let’s think about these different modes of explanation. I’ve argued in the past—and I wonder whether you agree or disagree with this—that for a lot of journalists, the idea that Joe Biden was the only thing standing between us and Donald Trump was quite a powerful motivator. I worry about the extent to which many journalists have come to think of themselves as defenders of democracy—not because I don’t care about democracy, or because I don’t think that, as private citizens, trying to stand up for and fight for democracy is a noble cause—but because it makes it very tempting to try and frame every story in such a way that no reader of the story could possibly come to the wrong conclusion, which is to vote for somebody as dangerous to democracy as Donald Trump.
The irony of this whole story is that that concern made the re-election of Donald Trump more likely. At least if you think that that’s part of the motivation behind what was going on with some of the journalists here, then the fact that they didn’t write more openly about concerns around Joe Biden—the extent to which it was hard to get access to him, the extent to which people in his cabinet weren’t getting access to him—meant that he could try to run again in 2024. And that’s what prevented us from having an open primary in 2024—which meant that we got stuck with a candidate who had already proven to be quite unpopular in the polls and didn’t do very well in the 2020 primaries. Frankly, that candidate didn’t have the time or the opportunity to grow into a stronger candidate, as she might have done over the course of a competitive primary season.
To what extent do you think—perhaps not the beat reporters in the White House pool who were competing for scoops, though maybe some of them—the op-ed writers, the news anchors, the MSNBC talking heads, all of those others who are really influential in creating a climate of opinion… to what extent were they holding back because of what they would’ve thought of as the noble goal of trying to preserve the democratic system from the dangers it faces?
Thompson: I think some people talk about the media as if it’s all one big blob. I think there are individual actors at all of these places who are some of the best and toughest journalists around and I look up to them. But I agree with that. I think people let the Trump of it all enter into their heads.
I also agree that it’s not the job of journalists to convince people that Trump is a threat to democracy. You report what you can and let voters make up their minds about it, rather than putting spin on the ball. If you keep telling people, to varying degrees—and you could argue it’s much more the case now than before—that democracy is always under threat in America, I just think it’s way too simplistic. I do think it affected the Biden coverage in a way that ended up helping Trump in the end.
Mounk: I think one part of it is a dereliction of the professional duties journalists should have, which is to tell the truth. But the second thing is that I think it’s actually really self-undermining. I think it comes from a huge overestimation of the influence journalists can have. It’s this idea: If we don’t talk about this, people aren’t going to care about it and they’re not going to worry about it. But the average voter worried about it long before The New York Times wrote about it regularly. And then obviously, during the debate, it all came out. So I think it’s an overestimation.
Thompson: I completely agree with this point. It’s like, If we don't talk about it, voters aren't going to know. No one's going to know.
Mounk: The actual thing is—if we don’t talk about it, people are going to stop believing us and stop trusting us, which is actually very bad for democracy. But that is one level: the op-ed writer who privately does worry a little bit about what’s going on with Biden, but doesn’t want to go there because it might somehow help Trump in a vague sense—let’s just focus on something else. But the level of deception required—or perhaps the level of self-deception—for people who are close to Biden is completely different. Here we’re talking about people who are in daily contact with him, who are very well aware of the mental lapses he has, who are putting systems in place to limit his contact even with allies, certainly to stage-manage his public appearances. What were they thinking?
To take one example that I’ve really been trying to get my head around—Jill Biden. She’s someone who clearly cares deeply about her husband, to whom she’s been married for many decades. She’s clearly a very loyal spouse and partner. I find it very hard to fathom how someone who loves their husband and who observes both the extent of the mental decline he’s suffering from, and the ways in which the immense pressures of a job like the presidency must be accelerating that decline, could possibly wish for her spouse to be subjected to that for another four years. How is it that someone like Jill Biden can justify this to the country, but also justify it to herself? How is it that her concern for her husband’s well-being doesn’t take priority over whatever the motivation was for trying to win him another term?
Thompson: This is the question that so many people who have worked for Joe Biden and love Joe Biden still to this day have been asking themselves—and raging about—ever since the last debate. Because there is this feeling of: how could they?
Biden—like a lot of old people—had good hours and bad hours, good days and bad days. They were clearly managing him in a way to try to make sure that when he was in public and the stakes were high—like the State of the Union just a few months before the debate—he was at his best. But even if you see him often—like the First Lady did—this is how someone described it to me at the time: If you see him so regularly, and you think there’s even a 10% chance that he is going to act that way on the debate stage—if you love him—how do you let him go out on that stage? There are lots of different theories. I’ll just broaden it out and tell you what other people who know them have said.
Some people think she fell in love with the life. She had as many Vogue covers in four years as Michelle Obama had in eight. The glamour of the job. Someone put it to me like, she got Jackie-O’d. She was like, I can be a First Lady—an iconic First Lady.
Mounk: It is amazing how much self-delusion there was in this White House, right? From the first two years of the presidency—where everybody was comparing Joe Biden to FDR, and he’s completely reconstructing whatever—and then comparing Jill Biden to Jacqueline Kennedy. It’s an immense amount of self-delusion.
Thompson: No, I think it comes from the chip on the shoulder that Joe Biden had and that extended to all the people around him. People who had felt disrespected for a long time. Once they won, they were like, We’re going to show you. We’re better than Obama. We’re better than Clinton. We are FDR.
The more sympathetic version—towards Jill Biden, to be clear—is also that she’s not, as some have put it, a Lady Macbeth figure. Jill Biden, while she may have fallen in love with the life, never—at least in our reporting—was obsessed with power. She wasn’t scheming. She had no real policy priorities. She may have enjoyed the trappings of power, sure. But don’t deny Joe Biden agency. That’s what some people have told us. He wanted to do it. She was the enforcer. With her top aide, Anthony Bernal, she enforced loyalty, quieted dissent, and excommunicated naysayers or even people who raised questions. So she plays a pivotal role. She’ll go down—not, I think, in the way she wanted—as one of the more consequential First Ladies in American history. Her top aide will probably go down as the most powerful aide to a First Lady in American history.
Mounk: One episode that really struck me—at the time we were living through it, but particularly in retrospect reading your book—was the tragic figure of Robert Hur, the special counsel who was supposed to investigate Joe Biden taking home classified documents to his house in Delaware. He decided not to prosecute Joe Biden for that—which got him attacked from parts of the political right—but in explaining why he didn’t pursue charges, he said that if Joe Biden were put on the witness stand in a trial, he would likely present as an elderly gentleman who doesn’t fully recall everything, and that would make him a very sympathetic defendant. He also mentioned that in his deposition, Joe Biden at times didn’t have full mental clarity.
A lot of the White House machine attacked Robert Hur as a liar, as someone who was a political henchman just out to get Joe Biden, with real career consequences for Hur. There was a whole slew of opinion-making media in the United States—from MSNBC to places further in the center-left and center—who echoed those kinds of attacks. Tell us what the truth of that was, and also who some of the people were who were complicit in that character assassination.
Thompson: It's certainly just a classic story of a person who tells the truth being punished for it. I remember even someone inside the White House later on said, he said the thing, and no one could unsay it. He finally was the one, with the credibility, to say it. That’s why they attacked him so hard.
Some background here: In the aftermath of the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago to retrieve classified documents from Donald Trump, Joe Biden goes on 60 Minutes—I think in September 2022—and says that Trump was “incredibly irresponsible” in his handling. Then in November, right before the midterm elections, Biden’s own lawyers realize that he has a bunch of classified documents—and not just in one place, but in three different places, including his garage, next to his car. Given Biden’s comments about Trump—and also, Trump announces right after the midterms that he’s going to run for president—Merrick Garland decides to appoint a special counsel. This is Robert Hur. Robert Hur and his deputy eventually track down Joe Biden’s former ghostwriter. It’s a longer, messier story, but the ghostwriter had deleted some of the audio files in early 2023. They were eventually able to restore them. Hur and his deputy begin listening to Biden’s conversations with the ghostwriter from 2017. And they are stunned. They feel like, this guy is out of it. It’s troubling.
Fast-forward to October 2023—they sit down with Joe Biden for a two-part interview, about five hours total. And they can’t believe what they’re seeing. The 2017 Joe Biden seems cogent in comparison to the president they’re seeing in real time. Also, Biden is on tape in 2017 telling his ghostwriter, I have all the classified stuff downstairs. It’s essentially an on-the-record confession that he took classified documents with him after serving as vice president and kept them for himself. So Hur basically concludes that Joe Biden likely broke the law, but he’s not going to recommend prosecution because he’s essentially too addled to be found guilty.
The people most responsible for trying to slime and undermine Robert Hur—you mentioned the consequences; the man couldn’t find work for many months after this—I’d say was a combination of, certainly, Anita Dunn, and people like Hunter Biden, Jill Biden, and the entire family. The entire family was so upset, they instructed the White House to go full throttle. Joe Biden included. The night after the report came out—and Hur had said that, in multiple instances, Biden didn’t remember the year his son died—Joe Biden goes out in front of the public and lies. I don’t like to use that word—but he lied. Or he was too addled to remember what the truth was. He said, when Robert Hur brought this up, I thought it was none of his business. But Robert Hur never brought it up. Joe Biden brought it up himself. And Joe Biden used the death of his son in 2015 to try to undermine and ruin the career of Robert Hur.
That’s what happened. So I think most of the culpability lies with those top circles. There were certainly many aides who helped that along. Ian Sams—who’s recently been asked to testify in front of the Republican-led Oversight Committee—was leading comms under Anita Dunn on that issue. I’m more sympathetic to the media coverage before the Hur report. But after Hur, the coverage of Joe Biden’s age was really bad. If you look back at how some of the media covered Hur’s report—and then how they covered the release of the transcript—I just think it doesn’t age well.
Mounk: You mentioned Beau Biden and Hunter Biden. One of the tragedies of Joe Biden’s life—and one of the strange tragedies of the story as a whole—is that Beau Biden was the chosen successor. The smart, successful, hardworking, rising politician who was the presumptive heir to Joe Biden’s political career. He was kind of a golden boy, who tragically passed away from a serious disease. Now, one of the interesting things you chronicle in the book is that, actually, Beau and Joe Biden lied about the extent of Beau’s illness when he was still Attorney General of Delaware. So there’s actually a long history in the family of trying to occlude the true extent of serious medical conditions. But Beau Biden is certainly a tragic and sympathetic figure. And the son who survives is Hunter Biden—someone who clearly has many affecting qualities, who is deeply beloved by his family, but who is not the golden boy. He’s someone with serious substance abuse issues, who traded on his father’s name in order to make the money that he spent in a very lavish manner. Someone who lied on his application for a gun permit about the existence of his drug abuse problem, etc.
How does this whole melodrama—of Hunter Biden, his obvious misdeeds, and his father’s inability to give up hope that he might somehow be reformed—shape those years?
Thompson: We talked a little bit about Jill Biden before, but Hunter Biden was one of the most consequential advisors during Joe Biden's time.
Mounk: That’s another shocking thing I didn’t realize before. I thought the sympathetic reading is that Joe Biden is allowing himself to be used in all kinds of ways by his son. And because of the genuinely tragic nature of the Biden family story, Joe Biden isn’t able to tell his son, stop doing this, stop doing that, etc. But the extent to which Hunter Biden actually wielded influence within the White House is really shocking.
Thompson: Very much so. Again, it’s similar to Jill in that it’s not necessarily about policy direction, but in terms of enforcement, maintaining loyalty, direction, and I think also the decision to run again. On Hunter Biden, you put it very well. There was an heir and a spare quality to him and Beau Biden. And when Beau dies, Hunter wants to fill that void. He wants to become the heir, right? He wants to run for mayor of Wilmington. He wants to take care of his niece and nephew—Beau’s kids—the way that his aunt did for him and Beau. He’s also obviously made a lot of money. He wants to support the family. He wants to fill that void, and he obviously fails spectacularly.
He ends up having a relationship with Beau’s widow, a messy divorce with his wife, and doesn't run for mayor. Eventually, he spirals into a really, really deep crack addiction and also introduces Beau’s widow to crack cocaine as well. We can set aside the laptop for a moment. Then he essentially becomes someone whose entire spiral is self-documented, and that documentation is leaked online for all of his father’s political opponents to mine through. Now he’s also under legal—federal—investigation by his dad’s Justice Department. The thing about Hunter’s spiral that I don’t think is recognized enough is that when Joe Biden ran for president in 2019—when he announced in the spring of 2019—they didn’t even really know where Hunter was. He was completely off the rails. Hunter’s sobriety date—as he testified in court—was literally two and a half weeks after Joe Biden officially got into the race. His sobriety and getting himself together is completely intertwined with his father’s presidential run and legacy.
So it’s not that big of a surprise that Hunter would also be completely on board with Joe Biden running again. This is me putting him on the couch a little bit, but I’ve spent a little time with Hunter. Hunter saw in his father—and his father’s presidency—a chance at redemption. For everything he’d put his family through, for everything he’d done. I think he became an enabler of the decision to run again and also an enforcer, in the sense that anyone who had any doubts about it should be pushed aside.
Mounk: I saw Hunter Biden speak at a very strange convening that I attended in the fall of 2024, in the run-up to the presidential election. It seemed like a strange time for Hunter Biden to go in front of an audience of hundreds of people to speak about his personal story. And I have to say that I was surprised, at that point, by how evidently cogent and, in some ways, affecting he was in talking about his personal story, given that I had a rather negative opinion of him in light of all the things we know about him. But I do wonder to what extent, from Hunter Biden’s perspective, his father being president was an insurance policy against going to jail. Joe Biden had not pardoned him until after he lost reelection. It must have seemed to Hunter Biden that one reason to make sure his father ran for office—and hopefully won a second term—was that if he really was on the way to jail, his father could pardon him. As, eventually, he did—even though he did not run for reelection and was on the way out of the White House.
Thompson: I completely agree. I think this is, again, one of those questions—is it self-interest, or are they being honest about their intentions? I think part of Joe Biden’s motivation to run for president again was to make sure that Hunter didn’t go to jail. Because they believed—with some reason, by the way—that if Trump won, then he would throw Hunter in jail. Maybe even throw members of the family in jail. The thing about Joe Biden’s political career that’s been shown over and over again is that, at the end of the day, Joe Biden has a line: family is the beginning, the middle, and the end. He was always going to prioritize his family over everything else.
I also think Hunter Biden—and this gets more into the manipulative behaviors of an addict—would tell Joe Biden that the Republicans and Trump were continuing to attack him in order to try to make him relapse and commit suicide. You can’t let them do that. And I think that was also a factor in this equation.
Mounk: That’s fascinating. I know that’s not the focus of your book, but one of the things I grapple with in thinking about Joe Biden and his legacy is that I’m instinctively drawn to a relatively sympathetic reading of him. Which is that he was a devoted public servant for many decades, that he certainly would’ve had opportunities to make a bunch of money that he didn’t pursue, including after he left office in 2016. That he generally wanted to make the country a better place, and so on.
Then there’s the much more cynical reading of him, which is that he was, at the very least, complicit in the ways his son and other members of the family were making money off the Biden name. He did join meetings with business partners of Hunter Biden, in which it was very clear he was lending the imprimatur of the then-Vice President of the United States to Hunter’s enterprises. He never said to his son, I love you and I support you through whatever you do—but if you take on this role as a board member of Burisma, it’s going to very clearly read as an influence-peddling situation, particularly since you have no obvious geopolitical expertise and no obvious expertise in the energy industry. So you resign today. You’re not taking that job.
What do you think the right reading of Biden’s entanglement in these issues is? Was he the decent public servant who was unaware of those things? Was he the doting father who just didn’t know how to say no to his son? Or do you think there was a more selfish component like trying to make sure his family had financial resources and profited, in various ways, from his name and position of influence?
Thompson: Man, all of the above. I think when it comes to Biden, which way I lean on those interpretations honestly depends on the day. It depends who I’ve just recently talked to. And that’s not a dodge. Honestly, it’s because I think he is a very complicated person. The family is very complicated. But I do think, when it came to the family, they rationalized so much. They felt it was them against the world, and they were owed it, and it didn’t matter. Other people get away with more, right? That’s how a lot of people rationalize their own behavior.
There’s this one email that comes to mind—it’s from the laptop, but I think it was reported everywhere. The story I’m thinking of was in The Washington Post. When Obama wins, they make Hunter get rid of his lobbying practice because they’re worried about appearances. Hunter deeply resents the Obama people for this. After the 2012 election, Jim Messina—who’d been Obama’s campaign manager—goes out and starts working for a bunch of very rich companies. Hunter has this email where he rails against it. He’s so upset: You guys made me give up my thing, but now you’re doing something similar. I do think that kind of self-rationalization, when it comes to family, and excusing inexcusable behavior because it’s them against the world—that chip on the shoulder is just omnipresent in their psyche. I think that’s a big part of the story.
But I also like him sometimes. As far as presidents go—being pretty earnest and well-meaning—Joe Biden’s pretty high up there. I think there’s an earnestness to him that is the reason why he won, in general. Some of it was COVID and everything else, but if you go around the country, I think the majority of people are like, I think he’s a good guy. I think polls have shown that too. Over 50-plus years of public service; that has come through. So sometimes, I’m of two minds. And honestly, it will be for historians to figure it out. But I’m confused about it sometimes.
Mounk: Interesting. So we get the famous debate at the end of June 2024. It’s an unmitigated disaster. Some people realize—10, 15 minutes in—that this guy can’t possibly run for president. Other people take longer to come to that position. You tell the story very well in the book of how that debate scrambles everything. The Democratic Party elites, and I think a lot of people who had been trying to rationalize things to themselves who perhaps hadn’t been in as much contact with Biden as you’d expect, given the positions they held, finally realize the jig is really up. We don’t need to retrace that whole story. I think if people want that, they should read the book. But I’m curious about a few things in the weeks that follow.
One is just the basic coalition of politics here. When Biden gets elected in 2020, he’s the moderate candidate. And then, after winning the primary, he moves to the left. He appoints a lot of Elizabeth Warren’s people to key positions in the White House. He makes nice with the left of the party in ways that go beyond the usual post-primary consolidation. So I guess that helps explain part of it.
But one of the really strange things about those weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate performance is that it’s relatively moderate Democratic politicians who tend to say, this is not going to work. And some of the very last people to defend him are—if I’m remembering right—Bernie Sanders, AOC, people on the really progressive wing of the party. I just didn’t understand that at the time. I’m not sure I fully understand it now. They’re not complicit in Biden. They’re not hanging out with him every day. They don’t have anything to cover for, right? Nobody’s going to say to them, why did you lie to us about Joe Biden? So why don’t they just tell the truth at that point? Why, instead, do they stay in this delusion that somehow we can defend Biden?
Thompson: There are a few reasons. I’d say the most naked one is just self-interest. The reason the Democratic Party freaks out—and no one should get, I think, many points for courage after the debate—is that they weren’t speaking out or raising concerns about his fitness for the job, most of them. Or about his ability to do the job in 2029. They were doing it because they were like, he can’t win. He’s going to bring us down with him. So part of the reason why the moderate Democrats were freaking out more back then is because they’re in vulnerable seats.
Mounk: So the progressives are sitting in seats that they're definitely going to win.
Thompson: Yes. That’s the most basic reason. But also, your point is very well taken. It is shocking to anybody who had observed Joe Biden, especially in the ’80s and ’90s, that he had cultivated real loyalty and allegiance among the Congressional Progressive Caucus and among most progressives. This is mostly because, usually, after candidates win the primary they pivot to the middle. Joe Biden, in 2020, was in the center during the primary and then pivoted to the left. And the theory of the case when he did that was: they didn’t want a repeat of 2016, when they felt that the Bernie folks ended up really hurting Hillary. So in some ways, you could argue this was a case of overlearning past lessons.
Then, when he gets in and governs—some senior administration officials, including cabinet members, believed that if Joe Biden had been 20 years younger, he would’ve governed differently. Because, given the limitations on his time and energy, he deferred a lot to staff—very much including Ron Klain, who comes more from the progressive wing of the party. And Ron prioritized relationships with the Progressive Caucus believing that, especially with the narrow margins in Congress, you had to keep the left on board.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Alex discuss the reaction of Kamala Harris, and how (or if) the Democrats can regain the trust of the American people. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
