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
possibilities who don't endorse her that day are Gretchen Whitmer, who is kind of like taken aback by all of it, And J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. Pritzker kind of calls around that day, is anybody going to run? I think if anybody else had run, maybe Pritzker would have run.
But he certainly was not going to be the only one running against the incumbent vice president, the first ever black woman vice president in history. So by the next day, it was a done deal. Whitmer and Pritzker were on board. Obama announced that he was on board, and that was that.
They still hate her though, the Bidens.
And the other thing from the Obama perspective is that, one, he feels like what he says to Joe Biden isn't heard because, and he's used these words, Joe's still pissed at me about Hillary. He knows. Biden will not listen to him. There was this kind of mythology that some people posited on MSNBC that Obama had gotten George Clooney to write that op-ed, which is not true.
George wrote it on his own. But beyond that, Obama told him not to publish it, that it was just going to get Biden's backup. So there is a degree to which, A, he thinks like this guy just doesn't listen to me at all. The best thing I can do is just be here and say.
No. He checked in on him in 2023 and just tried to reaffirm to Biden how much tougher this was going to be and how tough Trump was going to be. Thought Biden was Biden. Thought Biden was old. Thought Biden was, you know, who he is. But that's the degree to that, that he said anything. He would talk to Schumer. He would talk to Pelosi. He would talk to Hakeem Jeffries. And he would guide them
There was the polling became very important to the crowd that was trying to the real top crowd trying to get Biden out of the race. Pelosi, Jeffries, Schumer.
I think what did it are two things. One, Schumer telling Biden about the meeting that the Democratic senators had with the Politburo, with these top aides, in which a lot of people expressed concerns. And ultimately, at the end, John Fetterman, who was a Biden supporter, a dead ender, says, who's with me?
And there were maybe five Democratic senators out of a 51 senator caucus that were with Biden. Schumer told that to Biden and Biden did not know that because Donilon had not told him and Reschetti had not told him. And then the second thing was Mignon Moore, who set up the Democratic National Committee, longtime respected Democratic operative,
She had, when she took the job to run the DNC, started this ad hoc committee called the What-If Committee. And that was just to prepare for anything. And one of the things the What-If Committee did was keep track of the delegates, especially after the debate. And the What-If Committee conveyed to Reschetti and Donilon
Biden can still win the nomination at the convention, but it will be tight and it will be ugly. And I think that those two things, your senators have abandoned you because he thought Biden always thought of himself as a creature of the Senate and you can win, but it's going to be a very hideous victory. I think that just convinced him.
Plus, by the way, he made this decision while he was really sick with COVID, which could not have encouraged him that he was up to this over the next few weeks.
Look, I'm 56. I am not capable of doing things that I could do when I was 35. And I don't just mean, you know, running up and down a basketball court. Like I'm not as cognitively sharp now. Am I wiser? Sure. So I get that argument. But at a certain point, when I have aged past my cell date, CNN will show me the door or whoever I'm working for at the time.
But the presidency and politics in general is the only world in which there is no one, no boss to do that. It is the voters. It's up to the voters and the voters can be snookered in an era of tribalism. They can be told it doesn't matter if so-and-so is a kumquat. All that matters is that he's not the other guy.
And so we are not only in a gerontocracy, we're in a gerontocracy where tribalism makes it easier to do. I mean, it's still amazing to me that after everything that happened with Biden, Kay Granger, who was the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, somehow managed to quietly step down from leadership and then just check herself into a home for dementia.
while still drawing a congressional salary as if she was showing up to work every day. And Republicans in Congress, some of them knew about it, and they would just say, oh, it's so sad, it's so sad. Yes, it's very sad. But also, why is she drawing a congressional salary?
But now we have anecdotes and facts about what was really going on behind the scenes.
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 then after the election, we found out all of these things later. 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.
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