New book '2024' offers inside look at twists and turns of the presidential election

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Reporter’s Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf are out with a new book unpacking the twists and turns of the 2024 presidential election.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with insiders from the Trump, Biden and Harris campaigns, the book offers a revealing look at the extraordinary circumstances that led to Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the Republican Party’s reclamation of Congress.

The book is called “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.” And I spoke with two of its co-authors earlier today.

Tyler and Isaac, welcome to the “News Hour.” Thanks for being here.

Isaac Arnsdorf, Co-Author, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America”: Thanks for having us.

Tyler Pager, Co-Author, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America”: Thanks so much.

Amna Nawaz: So, kick us off here, Tyler.

There’s no shortage of books about the 2024 election, the rise of Donald Trump, the disarray among Democrats. This is the first book I read where you’re really layering all of these narratives and tying everything together, though what was it you wanted to achieve in writing this book?

Tyler Pager: Yes, what we wanted readers to be able to understand is really how we got to where we are.

And you can’t just start with that fateful debate last year. You need to understand this two-year time period, this remarkable moment in American history where we see Trump — we begin the book with the search at Mar-a-Lago where the FBI is looking for those documents and we begin just before the 2022 midterms where there’s a lot of anxiety about Joe Biden running again.

So we wanted to take readers from those moments to where we are now and intersperse that all in real time with Kamala Harris, of course, as well. So there’s a lot to unpack about this election. And we hope readers will find that in the book.

Amna Nawaz: There’s a line in the book where you write: “The election hinged on accidents and individual decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way.”

Isaac, there’s one key decision, which was Biden’s senior advisers pushing him to debate early. In the memo that you have about that advice, there’s a line that says: “The earlier you’re able to debate the better.”

That’s them telling him, get out there. We know that debate ended disastrously for him. But what was behind that push from his advisers?

Isaac Arnsdorf: What that memo really captures is the miscalculation that his advisers made, because they were aware of the public perception that he was too old to do the job, but they thought it was just that, a public perception.

And they thought that by putting him out there and showing him to an audience of 50 million people, that would be the best way to address that. Instead, we got something very different.

Tyler Pager: And just to add on to that, for most of his campaign, advisers recognized that there was a problem, because Trump was leading in the polls, and they thought they just needed to get his message out there more and they thought he was an effective messenger.

And that’s why they wanted this debate early. They thought that was the best way to shift the narrative, for Biden to make the affirmative case himself.

Amna Nawaz: There’s also this other detail that you reveal in the book about former President Obama revealing concerns about the Biden reelection campaign almost a year before Election Day. What did you learn about that?

Tyler Pager: Yes, Barack Obama has long not been thinking the highest of Joe Biden’s political skills. He encouraged him not to run before the 2016 election. He had concerns ahead of 2020.

And after Joe Biden won, he felt strongly that Joe Biden should not run for reelection. And he tried delicately to warn Joe Biden about the political strength of Donald Trump and the political problems that Joe Biden and the Democrats faced. There are many times Barack Obama showed up to the White House and brought up these concerns.

But given Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s history, particularly as it relates to running for president, Barack Obama was not always the one that Biden and his aides wanted to listen to.

Amna Nawaz: There’s some personal resentment there, as you reported in the book too and the degree to which personal relationships dictate a lot of these big decisions.

There’s also you really detail in the book about how, on Trump’s team, there are a number of former staffers from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who then staffed the Trump reelection campaign. How did that impact how they did their jobs?

Isaac Arnsdorf: Well, it was very personal for Trump, too, that he really felt like he made DeSantis and DeSantis had no business challenging him.

And then, going down to his staff, they had personal experiences working with DeSantis and not very pleasant experiences. And they correctly identified him as really the only person who could beat Trump in the primary. So there was a strategic element to it, but they relished it because of that personal dimension.

Amna Nawaz: One of the great what ifs of the Harris campaign, Tyler, as you know, was had she had more than 100 days to redefine herself, to break away from the Biden baggage, could things have been done differently for her?

There’s a phone call between President Biden and Vice President Harris before she’s preparing to debate Donald Trump. Why is that call important?

Tyler Pager: Yes, what’s remarkable about this is this call happened the day that she is slated to debate Donald Trump in Philadelphia, that infamous debate where she does quite well in that performance.

But hours before that debate, she receives a call from President Biden ostensibly to wish her good luck in that debate. But what he goes on to talk about is that he’s very popular in Pennsylvania, he reminds her. And says I’m hearing from friends that you’re not being so loyal to me in the way that you campaign and you should be careful because that could have backlash for you if you criticize or separate yourself from me, which is just a remarkable moment.

Because Joe Biden is not popular at this point. That is why he’s no longer the nominee. And Harris is trying to separate herself from him. She’s having trouble doing that for a whole host of reasons. And this call only further hinders those efforts.

Amna Nawaz: Isaac, when you look at the way in which Donald Trump won reelection and you’re now covering him as he is president again, how does one inform the other?

Isaac Arnsdorf: Well, Trump won by doing it his way. He had a lot of people throughout his political candidacy telling him to sand down the hard edges and to tack toward the middle.

And Trump ran saying that he was going to pardon all the January 6 defendants. And that’s exactly what he did. So, by actually running a campaign where he played to his base and played to his issues of immigration and the economy, he’s and his advisers feel like that has given them license and a free hand and a mandate to lean into those issues as hard as they possibly can, much harder than the first time.

Amna Nawaz: I always wonder about this, because you speak to so many people inside the White House, inside the Biden and Trump and Harris campaigns who share all these stories in an unvarnished way.

Why do you think that they spoke to you? What is it about the narrative they want to correct? Or what is it about the story they want to get out there?

Tyler Pager: Yes, I mean, I think, as I said at the beginning, our goal here was to was to tell the definitive and comprehensive story of this consequential election.

And I think we cast the widest possible and wanted to make sure that we reached everyone. We have interviews with Donald Trump. We have interviews, brief one, with Joe Biden. We made a real concerted effort to let everyone share their part of the story. And I think there’s obviously always some score settling involved and people trying to second-guess other people’s decisions.

But I think, as part of our reporting process, we really tried to gut-check everything and make sure that we were telling the truth at the end of the day. And there’s a lot of competing versions of that. But I think our book does the best job of telling that comprehensive story, so you really understand how we got to where we are today.

Amna Nawaz: Isaac, why do you think people want to talk to you?

Isaac Arnsdorf: Well, they know that this is history. And they know that this is going to be how they’re remembered and the choices that they made and the mistakes that they made and the credit that they can try to claim.

Amna Nawaz: Isaac Arnsdorf and Tyler Pager, along with your co-author, Josh Dawsey, we should say, the book is “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.”

Good to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Isaac Arnsdorf: Thank you.

Tyler Pager: Thanks.