Alyssa Mastromonaco
Appearances
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Because like, there's a lot of faith, you know, you're like, oh, I'm just going to start on the transition, but you haven't been given your job in the White House yet. And so you're a little bit on, you know, pins and needles. And to Piper's point, you know, we had this thing on the campaign called the block schedule, which is like the Bible. It's everything Barack Obama is going to do.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
And I was in the transition office and this woman who I'm going to say her name because I love her today. But at the time, I almost had a stroke. Mona Sutphin, who is deputy chief of staff for policy, goes rolling through with the block schedule and it's all marked up with her handwriting. And she's like, Ron wanted me to take a whack at the first hundred days. I was like, 100 days? What?
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
That is my job. Give me my schedule back. It was. And the thing is, the thing that was so hard for me is that Pfeiffer and I were not in the same office. So I couldn't go in his office, close the door and be like, buddy, you're not going to believe what happened. I'd like secretly call him from the bathroom in the Chicago transition.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Does anyone give you a tour or do you just kind of like waltz in and figure it out? You just walk in. It's like, make no mistake. It's sort of prison-like. Like, if you think about the DMV, that's kind of what it's like.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
You know, historically, vetting is part of the transition. It is, you know, you need your papers, you need to submit them. They need to be vetted by the FBI and other people. You're learning. I mean, the one thing that Biden had a leg up on is that, He and several of his closest advisors had been in the White House for eight years as vice president.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
So we have some valuable insight to impart on this very abnormal moment. So today we're talking about just that. Also here to moderate this conversation, definitely not an old vet of anything, is producer Caroline Reston.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
So a lot of the things that we kind of suffered from or would have suffered from in 2008 and nine, had we not been given the access that we got, weren't as catastrophic for him. But they still they still just slow everything down in a in a in a world where you still only have what, like 60 days, buddy, like ish to transition, give or take.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
I don't know what mechanism would inform Biden of what I'm sure all of the all the surveillance equipment.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
They're always with us. They might have given a little parting gift, like here's a summary of the off-label conversation that they had. But no, in general, Caroline, most of the foreign relations leader-to-leader contact is pretty...
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
When I tinker with the outline, I tinker with the outline.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
ceremonial, I guess, during the transition and by design, because nominees and presidents elect aren't supposed to be conducting foreign policy until they're president. So when you come into office, almost every foreign leader on the planet calls up and wants to talk to you. And then you, with the help of
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
30 members of the National Security Council figure out which order you reply to those calls in and how you set them because you don't want to offend people. And there's a lot of a lot of considerations that go into the order in which you return the call.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Yeah, it's got to be the you. I would imagine it was the former mommies. Yes. But thanks, Caroline. But it should, for the most part, it is usually kept to that, you know, phone call, look forward to working with you. See on the backside, you know, onward.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
He's also been president before, so I think that's maybe a little bit different.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Shooting them out of T-shirt guns.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Are these the job applications to work for the administration? It is so wild. I had to read it many times. Something like this can't be true, but it is.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
No, we didn't because these are for the cabinet.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Yes, these are his applications. But I still don't think Kathleen Sebelius was digging into these kinds of thought starters.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
We don't even know if there were questionnaires when we were in the office. They just kind of vet you? We just got vetted.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
The risk you run by being the person who doesn't offer a productive transition is that if something bad happens, it can blow back on you. So I think that giving people the keys to the car is just generally the right thing to do.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
I always thought that was still true.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Real quick, before we wrap this segment, just want to let everybody, including listeners, know that the W's were, in fact, according to ABC News, the springs under the W's were removed off of keyboards in the Eisenhower executive office building, but not in the West Wing.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
So I actually, I was on the transition. The transition for us was split between Chicago and Washington, D.C. And so Barack Obama, then President-elect Obama, and Michelle and the girls, they were staying in Chicago until the holidays because girls were still in school. So I was split between Chicago and D.C.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
and I, with Pfeiffer, worked on this is actually here's one of our funniest transition stories. So like Pfeiffer said, we did a lot of the we did a lot of the coordination around the cabinet secretary rollouts. They did not happen on Twitter as they do this time around.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
We actually had events where everyone would fly in and stand with the president for the most part and and be announced and he would have met with them and he'd come out and be like, I just met with my economic team and here's who they are.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
But one time things moved so fast and furious on the transition that one of my deputies, Lizzie, called Stephen Chu, who was going to be secretary of energy, to coordinate his travel. And when she called him, he goes, I guess I got the job. So. We had it is it is fast and furious. But yes, so I oversaw everything that the president elect was doing both in D.C., Chicago when he traveled.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
And then also Pfeiffer and I were both even though they're separate entities, there was the inaugural committee. And we both had a lot of visibility into that, too, because you can't have an inauguration that's off message or poorly organized. I mean, I feel like you can't now.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
We held ourselves to a high standard, you know?
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
I mean, people really don't understand how few resources there are on a transition committee. Like, Pfeiffer was in D.C., so I'm not sure if he saw the same level of it. But where I was, because President Obama was there most of the time, we had... Secretary Clinton, then Senator Clinton, was coming to see President Obama. And he's like, can we get her some juice or something?
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
And it required going to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a pitcher and then go to the Whole Foods to buy the apple juice. And then one of us had to take the pitcher home at night and wash it. And when he heard it was Peter Orszag's birthday, who was going to be our director of OMB, he's like, we should make him a cake, which meant one of us made him a cake.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
OK, so those were very different times when John McCain was coming to see President Obama after the election. He flew out to Chicago. There was no car service to pick him up. There was a nice guy named Ted Chiodo who picked him up McDonald's on the way so he could eat. That is it's it's rough and tumble. It is not a fancy.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
It is not the taxpayers are getting their money's worth through that process.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Welcome back to Inside 2024. I'm Alyssa Mastromonaco.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
But the other thing that's really hard about it is that, like, for example, Pfeiffer and I had worked together at that point, like side by side for two full years. And now they're just all these new people flooding in. And as Pfeiffer will attest, I don't like you until I like you. So that was a very hard time for me.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Buddy, is it still Inside 2024? What are we going to call it in 2025?
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Outside the country 2025. Wait, before we get started, I have to give you a little fun fact.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
PDB. Yeah, so what happens, and I learned this more, I sort of was clued into this more in 2012 when as deputy chief of staff, I actually ran the internal sort of transition process. So we were sitting in the White House, but I still had to reach out to the Romney team, onboard them. There's a small handful of people around.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Do you realize as we sit here and record today, we are older than Barack Obama was when he became president?
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
So there were a small number of people around Mitt Romney who were submitted for security clearance so that they could be with Mitt Romney if and when he received any of these briefings. And you just get them all briefed up. So it's the it's the nominee plus, I'd say, a small handful of people who all have access to a sort of maybe slightly diluted presidential daily brief.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
But, you know, when we were the nominee and headed into the financial crisis, the Bush team was actually really good about looping in Obama and McCain on everything that they were thinking and talking about in the days leading up to the election around the financial crisis.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Extremely, extremely. The Bush, I don't think that we could have been any luckier in our transition than how the Bush folks handled it. And they had told me in some of my transition meetings that in some ways it was kind of informed.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
by how they came into office in 2000, which was different and a little contentious and, you know, maybe not the jolliest of transitions after, you know, the Supreme Court decided the election. But I found – and I'll let Pfeiffer speak to the financial crisis because to just show how – sort of organized or whatever the Obama campaign was, the economy was not my bag. And so I did not pick it up.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
At least we're the same age. I'm doing it to myself, too.
Pod Save America
What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
I had to watch the movie Too Big to Fail to totally understand the financial crisis. So Pfeiffer would have a better a better sense of that.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
You can describe the transition most succinctly, I think, as just when the chickens come home to roost, like just across the board.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
Well, but it's December. We're winding down for the holidays, in theory, and it's time to rest and recharge. But alas, we are knee deep in a presidential transition period straight out of the upside down world. So, Dan, we're two old vets of the process. Caroline wrote that. We both served on the transition committee in the Obama years.
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What Really Happens During a Presidential Transition
When I say the chickens come home to roost, it's everything. It is like Pfeiffer and I were the heads of our departments on the campaign, which meant that, you know, for me, I probably had a hundred and some full-time employees. I had 500 part-time employees. Every single one wants a job. But meanwhile, we're like, have jobs yet?