Chris Whipple
Appearances
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But the truth was that she was quietly and secretly preparing. Her camp had reached out to Democratic political operatives who were looking at the rules and getting ready and making sure that when that day came, I think they thought, that she would be ready to go. And Sure enough, she was.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But not only were those operatives looking at the rules and figuring out how she could grasp the nomination, they were also putting out the word to some senators that they needed to come out in favor of Joe Biden stepping aside.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, the number one thing was that she had to be prepared for the $64,000 question, which they knew was coming. And that was, what would you do differently from Joe Biden? And when that day came, when Kamala Harris was appearing on the ABC program The View, it was a disaster. She fumbled the answer. She was asked that very question, which she was prepared for.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And inexplicably, she said, well, I can't think of a single thing, was how she began the answer. That was immediately turned into a campaign commercial by the Trump team, which was devastating. And that was a real turning point of the campaign. She wasn't prepared for that question. And she was prepared, but she couldn't answer the question. Fundamentally, Kamala Harris was loyal to Joe Biden.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
That's what her campaign staffers told me, that they told her they'd had several meetings in which one of them in which David Plouffe had said, you have to separate yourself and you have to rip this Band-Aid off. She couldn't do it.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
One of the ironies here is that her top campaign officials, Jen O'Malley Dillon and Lorraine Volz, had gone to the White House and specifically sat down with Jeff Zients, Joe Biden's chief of staff, and in effect asked for permission to separate themselves from Biden. And Zients told them, go for it, you know, do whatever you have to do.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Not only that, Joe Biden personally called Kamala Harris and said, look, I get it. You know, you need to win this campaign and don't worry about hurting my feelings. In effect, not in those words. So it's fascinating to me that even then she was unable to make that break.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, you know, this is what makes the book such an extraordinary story, I think. It's really remarkable the extent to which Biden's inner circle, not just his family but his close advisors, were operating in a kind of fog of delusion and denial. You know, I differ with people who say that this was a cover-up in the classic book.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
I think what happened was that the campaign took a page from the 2022 midterms. And you may recall that during those midterms, the Democrats really leaned heavily on democracy and women's reproductive rights. and defied the odds and did so much better than anyone thought they would do during those midterms.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
So I think the campaign took a page from that and not realizing that they're very different animals. Midterms are different from presidential elections. It probably didn't – those issues didn't have the same resonance in the presidential election, which is really all about the two candidates more than it is about issues, no matter how effective or resonant they might have been in the midterms.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
So I think a number of presidential – former presidential campaign managers I spoke to just felt that that was the wrong emphasis, that the real message had to be the economy, had to be bringing down costs, had to be trying to become a change candidate in an election where there was just a tidal wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Around the world, something like 50 out of 85 elections, in those elections, incumbents lost since 2020. So there was a real wave of anti-incumbent sentiment, and she never got out ahead of that.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, I think there's no question that Trump tapped into a very powerful network of alternative media and Harris did not. And of course, missing the Rogan interview was part of that. When I spoke to Susie Wiles, who, by the way, is just an absolutely fascinating character in my view.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
That's correct. Her story is really not well known. But Susie Wiles was emphatic and candid about what she thought the mistakes were by the Paris campaign. And she said she never had any doubt whatsoever that the Trump campaign would win. She said in, again, not mincing words, she said, we couldn't believe how bad she was, referring to Kamala Harris.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Watergate sense of the word, and that suggests that you're hiding something that you know to be true. What's so remarkable about this story is that Biden's closest advisors really were all in on this delusional notion that Joe Biden could function effectively for another four years as president at the age of 82 or 86 by the end of that term. And I find it just a really remarkable story.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And part of what she meant by that was that she felt that just like the Biden's handlers in 2020, that they were hiding her, not in the basement this time, but They were hiding her coming out of the convention, that there was a period of a couple of weeks where she wasn't doing interviews. General Malley Dillon, Harris's campaign chair, would dispute that.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But Susie Wiles was just really emphatic about the fact that they just couldn't believe how ineffective Harris was and never doubted they were going to win.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, let me start on the plus side when it comes to Susie Wiles. First of all, her relationship with Trump is absolutely fascinating. And she has a certain magic with him. And I think it goes back to the fact that she's the daughter of Pat Summerall, the famous sportscaster who struggled with alcoholism. And Susie Wiles knows something about handling difficult men.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But that's another story to talk about now. I think that on the one hand, this is not Trump 1.0. The Trump White House is no longer a battlefield of backstabbers and leakers. And there's not anything like the drama that happened during Trump's first term. And that's largely because of Susie Wiles. She has a kind of magic with Trump that none of her predecessors had.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Remember Reince Priebus and John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney. You know, he went through chiefs of staff at a rapid clip. I think Susie Wiles is going to be there for a while because he trusts her. On the minus side of the ledger, you're right.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
The most important part of the White House chief of staff's job is walking into the Oval Office, closing the door and telling the president what he doesn't want to hear. Now, you know, I've talked to Susie Weil since she's been in this job a number of times. She says that she has fought these battles with him.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
One of them was in the case of the pardoning, doing a blanket pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists. I said to her, did it ever occur to you to say to the president, wait a minute, maybe we should take a look at these one by one instead of a sweeping list? get out of jail free card? And she said, yes, that's exactly the conversation I had with him. I lost that argument.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, she's lost a lot of battles. And so that suggests that you should You know, this is going to be a long, rough road for her. And I'll add one other thing she said, which is particularly timely at the moment. She told me that there were a bunch of, as she put it, tariff zealots running around in the Trump White House. And we have certainly seen the result of that in recent days.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
To answer your specific question, you know, at one point, Bill Daley, President Obama's second White House chief of staff, spoke to Tom Donilon, who is the brother of maybe Joe Biden's closest advisor, Mike Donilon, his alter ego. And he said, you know, Daley said, how the hell is this going on? He used a more colorful adjective.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, it really is the second most powerful job in government. And that was my principal takeaway when I wrote the book back in 2017. He's critical because every president learns sometimes the hard way that you cannot govern effectively without empowering a chief of staff as first among equals to, number one, execute your agenda.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Number two, be the gatekeeper, who's the person who gives the president time and space to think. You have to be the keeper of the message, making sure that everybody's on the same page. You have to be the president's heat shield. Jack Watson, Jimmy Carter's last White House chief, calls him the javelin catcher, taking the heat for the president. It's just an extraordinarily critical job.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And again, to circle back to a question you raised earlier, he or she, at the end of the day, is the person who has to be able to tell the president what he doesn't want to hear.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Don Rumsfeld, who was a very good chief of staff for Gerald Ford way back in the day, said, you know, he's the one person besides the president's wife who can look him straight in the eye and say, you cannot go down this road. Trust me, it's a mistake.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, Eisenhower was smart enough to know that you really need to have a chief of staff to make things work. And he had a guy named Sherman Adams who was gruff and tough, and they called him the abominable no-man. He was the— Oh, because he said no all the time? Yes, exactly. He was the governmental equivalent of an army chief of staff, which is probably why Ike came up with the position.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But anyway, it began with Eisenhower, and really what I've discovered in writing the book was that no— No modern president has really been able to succeed without an empowered White House chief of staff. There would have been, in my view, no Reagan revolution without Jim Baker.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And Bill Clinton might well have been a one-term president without Leon Panetta, who really turned his White House around. So it's a very important issue. job. Cheney told me that, and Cheney, of course, was Gerald Ford's second White House chief at the age of 33 or 34, I think. Cheney told me that the White House chief has more power than the vice president.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And Tom Donilon said, you know, not even my brother has had this conversation with Joe Biden about his age. And you can be sure that if Mike Donilon didn't have that conversation, it's almost certain no one else did.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
That's true, except when Cheney was vice president.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, it was fascinating because Bill Clinton came into office thinking he was so smart that he could run the White House by himself. He was hardly the only president to think that. Jimmy Carter thought the same thing and learned the hard way that you can't. Bill Clinton came in with his kindergarten friend, Mack McLarty, who was very talented and smart. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, you know, I had my own reasons for wondering if the Biden White House staff was hiding the president, because when I was writing my book on the first two years of the administration, I asked for an interview with the president. I was told I could email questions and I would get written answers in reply.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
You know, clearly they were uncomfortable even then with the prospect of the president having an interview in real time with a reporter.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, here's the thing. As I say, I think that this is much more interesting and not nearly as simple as the notion of a cover up. In other words, I am convinced that Joe Biden's inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of governing and they believe that he could do it for another four years.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And we can't dismiss the fact that Biden, on the very last day, July 21st, that Sunday when his aides came to hammer out his abdication statement, Joe Biden was on the phone parsing the details of a complex multi-nation prisoner swap. He was on top of every detail.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
People who visited Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the Middle East said he was on top of every nuance of Middle Eastern policy. This is not – this was not Woodrow Wilson. This was not somebody over in the corner who was incapacitated while – You know, all the president's men ran the government. Joe Biden, behind closed doors, was governing capably, whether you liked his policies or not.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
So there's no question that he was a shadow of the campaigner that he once was. And that was true from 2020 all the way to the end. But you can't dismiss the fact, it's an inconvenient fact for people who say it was a cover-up, that Biden was capable.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
What I'm saying is the inner circle, and I've spent a lot of time talking to his closest aides, and I'm talking about Mike Donilon and Steve Reschetti and Bruce Reed and others. And four months after that debate, I went to the White House and I interviewed Reschetti and Reed, and they were still trapped in this kind of – force field of denial.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
They still believed that Biden would have been reelected, could have been reelected, would have governed capably for another four years until he was 86. Now, I find that to be misguided and delusional, but They believe it.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And Mike Donilon went to the Harvard Kennedy School months after the election and said he thought the party had lost its mind by walking away from the guy who got 81 million votes in 2020. So all I'm saying is that those guys weren't covering up somebody that they thought was incapable of governing. They believed he was still on his game.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
He was in a terrible state. He was absolutely exhausted. He was unable, really, to follow— what was happening in the campaign. He was tuned out. He was obsessed with NATO and with foreign policy, particularly with Emmanuel Macron of France and Olaf Scholz of Germany. He kept talking about how they said he was doing such a great job.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Klain wondered half-jokingly if Biden thought he was president of NATO and not president of the U.S. He didn't really have anything to say about his second-term plans. And early on, he walked out of a session in the Aspen Lodge, the president's cabin, went over to the pool, sank into a lounge chair, and just fell sound asleep.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Well, I don't know if the campaign ever formally considered canceling the debate. I said to Ron, given the condition of the president that he described, I said, did you think about, wait a minute, we should put this off? And Klain said, no, look, it just wasn't politically feasible to do that, given the sensitivity, given the fact that his cognitive condition was such a huge issue.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
They had to go forward. They couldn't – they had no choice in Klain's view. But as you said and as I report in the book, Biden was – Klain was trying every trick in the book to bring the president up to speed. He got him on the phone with Melinda French Gates who – loves to talk about child care, hoping that that might kindle some interest in talking about his second-term plans for that.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And it worked for a minute, but then Biden lost interest. So it was not a pretty picture, that Camp David preparation.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
It was a typical thing for Joe Biden, and it was almost like producing a Hollywood movie, literally, because Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg were on a Zoom call with him before he went to Camp David advising him on – how to answer questions, and Katzenberg in particular specialized in body language.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Katzenberg was there during the whole week at Camp David prior to the debate, again, trying to help Biden look more authoritative with his movements on camera.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, was really impressed by how Spielberg was able to coach Biden for the State of the Union speech, the one that everybody concedes he hit out of the park when he was heckled by the MAGA congresspeople and he really owned them in the moment. So it's unusual, but not for Biden.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
So Joe Biden is at Rehoboth Beach with only his closest aides. He's there with Jill Biden and with Annie Tomasini, Deputy White House Chief, and with Anthony Bernal, the First Lady's senior advisor. Other than that, just Secret Service. Sunday morning, his closest aide, Steve Ruschetti, Mike Donilon come over and they sit down with him and they have this pivotal talk. And they walk him through.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
They talk about the polls. They talk about the party. Reschetti says to Joe Biden that, look, there's a path for you, but it's a brutal path. It's a lonely path. And And it's a real fight. There's a narrow path that you can walk to victory in the swing states. You can do it, but the party leaders are against you. It's going to be divisive and it's going to be a real battle.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But Reschetti was nevertheless all in if he was ready to go there, if he wanted to run for reelection. And again, I find this kind of extraordinary because, you know, the reality was, the truth was that there really was no path in the battleground states by that time. And the party leaders, of course, were arrayed against Reschetti.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And I think what was decisive was that all three of them, Reschetti, Donilon, and Joe Biden, obviously most important of all, they realized that the party leadership would come down on him like a ton of bricks come Monday, that if he didn't make that decision, in all likelihood, the party leaders would go publicly against him. And there was really no way out.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
You know, the whole relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama is so complex and fascinating and with so many levels to it. I mean, on the one hand, there's no question about the fact that they really bonded deeply. over Beau Biden's tragic death. And Barack Obama took Joe Biden under his wing, and they developed a closeness there.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But at the same time, there's a real competitiveness between them. And the Obama camp, for example, was not amused when Biden's staffers were going around early in his first term and talking about how the American rescue plan was so much bigger than Obama's stimulus package back in 2009. They're just competitive, these two camps.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
And the other major factor here is that Joe Biden never forgave Barack Obama for putting his thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton to become the nominee in 2016. That was a really deep wound for Joe Biden. And in the end, it became clear that as during that fateful weekend of July 2021, that Barack Obama wasn't really there. He just wasn't there for Joe Biden.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
One of Biden's closest friends told me that the thing that really got him was that Obama never picked up the phone and called him and just said, you know, Joe, geez, are you sure you're up to this? That never happened. There was a phone call earlier after the debate saying, hey, you know, it was just a bad night. Don't worry about it.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
But when things went south and Biden was on the ropes, Barack Obama never picked up the phone.
Fresh Air
The 'Fog Of Delusion' In Biden's Inner Circle
Yeah, you know, this is really previously unreported. But what I learned in writing the book was that prior to that weekend when Biden made his decision, you know, up to that point, Harris had had to be absolutely scrupulous. You know, she was walking through a minefield. I mean, she had to be so careful not to give any hint that she was thinking about taking over the top spot on the ticket.