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
Yeah. And if it hadn't been for COVID, who knows if that would have even worked in 2020. I mean, COVID, as one aide told us, was a huge tragedy and disaster for the American people, but a gift to Biden in 2020 because it enabled him to basically have a very inactive campaign schedule that was largely dependent on him doing Zooms.
No. No. And in fact, so in October 2023 is the last cabinet meeting, I think, until September 2024. And that period begins what one cabinet secretary of several we spoke with described as the weird period. where they were kept at bay. They didn't get a chance to interact with the president. There were exceptions to this, Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Austin, the Secretary of Defense.
But for the most part, a lot of these secretaries were just completely kept at arm's length. And one of them said that during that period, spring of 2024, the secretary did have a meeting with Biden, and he was mumbly, and incoherent and difficult to understand. And this person left the cabinet, that meeting, this cabinet secretary left that meeting upset and disturbed. But no one came forward.
When they would complain internally, they were told he's fine, be quiet. And this is a real large, this is a larger topic for
what we all need to reckon with when it comes to the American presidency today and the degree to which one person is bestowed with so much power and surrounded by individuals whose own power depends on that person maintaining power regardless of whether or not it's good for the White House, the party, or the country. But that power and the fear of what happens.
Look at Robert Herr came forward, did his job. He wasn't able to get a job for months. Dean Phillips came forward, said, Joe Biden should be challenged in the primaries. He's not up to this. He was essentially defenestrated. I mean, there was a real price to coming forward.
A lot of the tools that may have started out innocently enough for Joe Biden, every White House, indeed any successful person, is surrounded by people to help make them look as good as possible. Right. So a lot of those tools, note cards and teleprompter, et cetera, that were put there innocently enough for a 79-year-old president at the beginning of his term,
became crutches, and ultimately tools of the cover-up by the end. Because if you are a president, if you're 81 years old, and you're not able to go into a room full of donors and speak extemporaneously for 10 minutes, then there's something wrong. And that was happening in 2023. And Bill Daley, former Obama chief of staff, he went to one of those and he was distressed.
He tried to get other Democrats to run in the primary against Joe Biden. He reached out to Pritzker. He reached out to Newsom or Beshear. And nobody would do it. It's a fool's errand to take on an incumbent president in a primary, generally speaking. But... People saw this and they were disturbed. So, again, some things might start off like, look, we're just trying to help the president.
He wants a teleprompter. No big deal. All of a sudden, he can't answer questions at a fundraiser in 2023.
We get in a little bit to the Biden family lore and the way they look at the world, but there's a lot of not wanting to acknowledge realities.
Well, he was the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Delaware hiding the fact that he was debilitated.
And one of the most important parts of understanding Joe Biden is understanding his refusal to accept defeat. And it's, look, it's one of the things that we love about politicians or any sort of public figure. He gets knocked down, he gets back up again. And that's part of the ethos of Joe Biden, right? In this case, he didn't have that.
The midterms went better than expected, better than they had for Clinton or Obama in their first terms. Now, I think that a lot of the reason for that was despite Joe Biden, not because of Joe Biden. It was because of and this is according to his own pollsters and people close to him.
He did better than everyone thought in the midterms because there was a very engaged Democratic electorate because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade that year. And because Trump had gotten involved in a lot of primaries and backed not the best candidate for the general election, whether Blake Masters in Arizona or Herschel Walker in Georgia. But regardless, yeah, the midterms weren't as bad.
And imagine thinking, A, Joe Biden... The Joe Biden we all saw in The View or the BBC interview is capable of being president until January 2029. That's because that's what they think, the Biden first couple and Reschetti and Donilon. That's what they think. And also imagine thinking that the best prebuttal to our book, which quotes extensively the Pre-buttled?
Extensively quotes Democrats describing what they saw behind the scenes and how much it upset them, that the best way to pre-butt our book is to put him out there. Imagine thinking that. I mean, you know, this isn't an episode of The Twilight Zone where all of a sudden he swims in a pool and emerges with the energy of a 12-year-old. Like, he is still 82 and looks and sounds every day of it.
So as you note, he's not just a movie star. He is a Democrat, a very proud Democrat, and has been involved in some of the biggest fundraisers ever, including in the spring of 2024 at Radio City Music Hall, and then... I think that raised $27 million. Katzenberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg was running the fundraiser. And then he wanted another, Katzenberg wanted another fundraiser.
This one would raise $30 million, which would be the most money ever raised for a Democratic presidential candidate. And Clooney said, sure, tell me where to go. So it's June and Clooney has shown up. He was in Italy filming a movie. He and Julia Roberts are co-hosting this thing. So he's there and he sees Obama walk in and there's Obama, same old Obama. He loves Obama.
A little grayer, but, you know, same guy. And then Biden walks in and he's shocked. He hasn't seen Biden since December 2022 before he got a Kennedy Center honor, George Clooney. He sees him. He can't believe how slow he's walking, how much he's shuffling. And then Biden walks over and he's saying, hey, how you doing? Thanks for coming. Hey, how you doing?
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