Alex Thompson
speaker
143 appearances
15 recordings
7 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 2 Jun
Alex Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This is so amazing.
Yeah, I think you were mocking his stutter. And I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody's cognitive decline. I would think that somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses. diagnosing politicians from afar. Plenty of people have diagnosed your father from afar, and I'm sure it offends you, your father-in-law from afar.
I'm sure it offends you. You don't have any standing to say... I'm not diagnosing him.
Well, Alex Thompson and I were on the case, as were lots of other reporters, trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes. But the bottom line is the White House was lying, not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers.
They were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten. And in fact, Alex and I started writing this book, after the election of 2024. And we spoke with more than 200 people, most of whom, almost all of whom were Democrats, and almost all of whom wouldn't be honest with us or wouldn't be candid with us until after the election.
And then after the election, we found out all of these things that when you looked at what was going on with President Biden, At the time, it probably doesn't surprise you the extent to which he was deteriorating. But now we have anecdotes and facts about what was really going on behind the scenes with details that Democrats wouldn't share with us until after Election Day.
I think a lot of us have covered Joe Biden's aging and the accompanying inabilities to do things the way he used to do throughout his presidency. But what we uncovered after the election was over, when all the people that we had been talking to for months and years...
And all of the people who had been saying, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, were suddenly willing to talk about what had been going on. But it was only after the election that we were able to get the inside point of view.
Before that, the only insider point of view we really got was from the Her report, when the special counsel said what he saw behind closed doors, sitting down with Biden for an extended period of time.
Before that, it was all a lot of, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine. But now, Alex and I have spoke with more than 200 people after the election, and unencumbered by their fears of, if I say this, then Joe Biden won't get elected or Kamala Harris won't get elected. they were much more candid.
And look, it's very important that folks were noting that, you know, he tripped on stage at a graduation at the Air Force Academy. But comparing that to him not being able to conjure forth the name of George Clooney or recognize George Clooney, somebody he'd known for decades and somebody throwing him the most lucrative fundraiser in the history of the Democratic Party.
Those are two different things. Noting that he, you know, mistakenly thought that in 2021, he'd had a conversation with Francois Mitterrand as opposed to Emmanuel Macron. We all saw that and we noted it and we talked about it. But that compared to him not knowing the name of one of his top advisors in December 2022, There's a difference.
And what we found by writing this book was that everything that we saw was going on in front of the camera. It was much worse behind the scenes.
There's also, um, a couple other things to unpack with that. One is that the issues that animated Joe Biden the most in his presidency were national security issues, was NATO, was the Middle East, was Ukraine, Russia. And so I don't doubt that he was most engaged and also that those meetings when they scheduled them were in peak performance time, noon, one o'clock.
But the other thing that Blinken says... Hang on, Jake.
Not a couple, but 10 to 4 is what Alex's reporting was in 2023. And that, I think, is even generous because he was not in the Oval Office every day from 10 until 4.
And you hear this argument a lot from not just the Politburo, which is what some of the administration came to calling Tom Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the two top aides, and not just the first family's eyes and ears, Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini. But what... Others would say, oh, his decision-making was always fine. His decision-making was always fine. Okay.
The job of the president is not just decision-making.
One top aide said to us, the job is making hard decisions and communicating them to the American people. And this aide said, he was always able to do number one. Number two was a struggle, and it got worse throughout his presidency. But number two is... So much. Yes, you want the person to be able to make good decisions, but you also they need to persuade. They need to cajole.
They need to be able to the American people need to have faith in this person. Our Western leaders need to have faith in this person. And he lost a lot of that.
Showing 41–60 of 143 · page 3 of 8
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