#415 — The Cover-Up
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.29361
Summary
Jake Tapper joins me to talk about his new book, Original Sin, and his upcoming tour, Truth and Consequences, with Jake Tapper. We also talk about why we should stop giving out free tickets to movies and TV shows, and why that s a mistake.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing
00:00:11.980
this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part
00:00:16.320
of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast,
00:00:20.860
you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's
00:00:26.400
made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing
00:00:30.420
here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.
00:00:40.700
I have a brief housekeeping here. I want to update you all on some changes we're making to the podcast.
00:00:48.160
After many years of giving free subscriptions to everyone who asks for them, usually at least 100
00:00:53.780
people a day, some days over a thousand, it has become clear that this policy is no longer working
00:01:00.620
as intended. Unfortunately, just too many people are taking advantage of it. We've always known that
00:01:07.320
some percentage of people would abuse the policy, but things have recently gotten out of hand. This
00:01:14.080
might have something to do with my releasing more podcasts on video. I'm not sure, but it's just
00:01:21.100
obvious from the pattern of behavior that this is not what we intended or what anyone would assume
00:01:32.280
we would intend. And so, regrettably, we have been forced to acknowledge that the policy is
00:01:38.580
well and truly broken at this point. We might revisit it in the future or not. I don't know.
00:01:45.040
But for now, the paywall on the podcast and on Substack will be a normal paywall. If there's
00:01:52.320
content we feel that really must reach a wider audience, we can release that as a public service
00:01:57.100
announcement. So, I'm sure that'll happen. And that ensures that the most essential messages
00:02:03.600
get out there and remain accessible to everyone, regardless of their subscription status.
00:02:08.360
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge all of you who have been supporting my work
00:02:13.460
with your subscription throughout this whole time, and thank you for doing that and choosing to pay
00:02:20.140
when you could have taken it for free. It's really all of you who deserve the credit for enabling us
00:02:26.100
to offer this free policy for so many years. In truth, it worked far longer than anyone would have
00:02:32.100
expected. I also want to address those of you who will rightly claim that I originally said that anyone
00:02:37.820
who couldn't afford the podcast could always get it for free. At the time, I certainly meant that,
00:02:43.760
and I still wish this could be the case. But this policy was a novel experiment for a digital
00:02:52.040
subscription business, and at this point the results are just not compatible with what we're
00:02:57.100
trying to do here. That said, we will continue to offer partial scholarships, and you can find
00:03:02.480
information about how to apply on the subscription page of my website. On another note, I'm going to
00:03:08.500
be doing some live events this fall. It seems strange to say it, but it has now been six years
00:03:15.160
since I've toured. That is amazing to me. Time is moving faster than I like to admit, and it suddenly
00:03:24.640
seems more important than ever to actually connect with people out there in the real world. So I'm going to
00:03:30.580
be doing that in September and October. We're just putting four dates on the calendar for the moment.
00:03:36.520
We'll see how this evolves. Paid subscribers will have early access to the tickets during the pre-sale.
00:03:42.720
So if you're not already a subscriber and you want early access to tickets, head over to
00:03:46.960
samharris.org forward slash subscribe. All the relevant info, including the official announcement,
00:03:54.320
pre-sale codes, ticket links, etc., will be sent through the newsletter. So make sure you're signed up for
00:04:00.480
that. And these shows are not going to be live podcasts where I interview someone. It will be
00:04:07.480
me out there talking about what seems most urgent for us to think through at this point. I have a
00:04:13.440
pretty good sense of what those topics will be, but as you know, a lot can happen very quickly these
00:04:19.260
days. We're calling this tour Truth and Consequences, and I am really looking forward to seeing many of you
00:04:35.060
I am here with Jake Tapper. Jake, thanks for joining me.
00:04:38.460
It's my pleasure. Long-time listener, first-time caller.
00:04:41.280
Nice. Well, I've been a fan of yours for years. You have a new book out, Original Sin, which you
00:04:46.760
wrote with Alex Thompson, which I have just read in galley form. And first, congratulations. The book
00:04:54.300
seems to be getting just a little bit of attention now.
00:04:57.640
It's quite a thing, yeah. Well, we wanted, when we pitched the book, we said we wanted it to be out
00:05:05.660
in May, and that was one of the reasons we went with the publisher we went with, because we felt
00:05:10.540
like that would be a time when people would be ready to start reckoning with this thing, with
00:05:18.660
this Shakespearean drama that the world just went through. And I guess the timing has just worked out.
00:05:24.300
Yeah, and it is, I mean, it's quite Shakespearean. It's quite a disturbing picture of hubris and
00:05:31.660
delusion, you know, always self-serving delusion, and more than a little dishonesty. I mean, it's
00:05:39.960
really, one thing that's very inconvenient from my point of view is, even though I think, you know,
00:05:46.860
Trump and Trumpism are a thousand times worse, both as characters and political phenomenon,
00:05:52.000
than what we're unearthing on the Democratic and Biden side of this. There are so many parallels
00:05:58.640
which allow for a game of whataboutism to be played. And I think there's going to be
00:06:02.980
some sort of 20 megaton satisfaction on the side of the right to discover just how fully
00:06:11.300
the rot had spread within the Biden camp and just how much deceit in the end. I mean,
00:06:17.460
just what a cover-up story this is. Again, I think, you know, the burden is on us to keep
00:06:23.620
this in proportion, but it really is, I found your book pretty shocking.
00:06:29.780
Yeah, we were shocked, Alex and I, when we were reporting it. We started the project right after
00:06:34.860
Election Day. Obviously, Alex has been aggressively covering the Biden administration as a White House
00:06:39.720
correspondent. I, you know, had interviews and I did that debate, obviously. But the big question,
00:06:46.500
what was going on behind the scenes? Alex got some answers, I got none. But after Election Day,
00:06:53.420
people were willing to talk, shockingly so. And we talked to more than 200 people,
00:06:59.960
almost all of them Biden-loving Democrats, almost all of them, you know, tried to get his agenda
00:07:05.300
past or supported it or raised money for it or whatever. And again, almost all these interviews
00:07:11.320
were after the election. And what they told us just was shocking. And even when I was doing the
00:07:15.160
audio book, I would stop after every chapter and be like, I still can't believe that happened. I mean,
00:07:19.380
just crazy, crazy stuff told to us by, as you, as you read, you know, sources in the room.
00:07:27.520
Yeah. Yeah. So the classic question, what did they know and when did they know it is really the,
00:07:31.800
the theme of this book? You know, again, your book is dropping tomorrow at the time we're recording
00:07:36.820
this. It'll be out when this is released. But, you know, there's already a fair amount of chatter
00:07:41.280
about its contents. I can only imagine there's going to be an allegation, again, probably just
00:07:47.060
coming from right of center, that you and the rest of the commentary, you know, anyone working in
00:07:53.400
journalism must have known all of this much earlier than, than now. Right. And, and so I guess I want
00:08:01.960
to track through your book systematically, but. There's a lot of skepticism and anger on the right.
00:08:06.100
And frankly, I don't begrudge them for having it. Yeah. I mean, so this is the big, so from the,
00:08:10.240
the rights point of view, this is the big lie that was foisted on the American people that Biden was
00:08:15.060
compos mentis the whole time that he was fit to run for reelection, that he could easily serve for
00:08:20.820
four more years. Obviously the lie was put to that, you know, just emphatically for the entire world
00:08:26.100
in the, in the debate performance we're going to talk about, which you co-moderated, but coming back
00:08:32.100
to this fundamental question, at what point do you think, I mean, we're going to talk about how early
00:08:37.700
the, the inner circle knew how much he was unraveling and what they did to cover it up. But when you look
00:08:44.400
back on just the role of journalism at the time, or is it, is it a story of the Biden administration
00:08:51.560
successfully deceiving and stonewalling everyone in sight? Or is it, do you feel that journalists
00:08:58.640
like yourself averted your eyes from a kind of an open secret? It's a complicated question. And the truth
00:09:07.000
of the matter is that even those of us who, you know, like I, I, when I interviewed Joe Biden in
00:09:13.940
September, 2020, I asked him if he would pledge to be transparent about his health. I did not think
00:09:20.120
at the time that he was adult. I thought that he was old and that, you know, that, that age was showing
00:09:28.480
by 2022. I interviewed him again. He seemed like he'd aged like 20 years in those two, but he didn't
00:09:36.820
seem adult. He just seemed super old. Then the Biden that I saw the next time I saw him in person
00:09:43.700
up close was at the debate. And I was as shocked as anybody else. And I, you know, had been paying
00:09:50.460
attention. Look, we all saw the video images of him stumbling or tripping. But I think that that said,
00:09:59.360
there is a difference between airing a video of Biden tripping on the stage at the Air Force
00:10:06.080
Academy graduation, which I aired on my show too. There's a difference between that as important as
00:10:11.120
it is, and I'm not denigrating the importance of it. There's a difference between that and doing
00:10:15.300
the kind of investigative journalism that Alex and I did that showed senators having concerns about his
00:10:21.800
acuity and wondering how it was affecting policy that showed him unable to come up with the names of
00:10:26.860
not just George Clooney at a fundraiser, but a top national security advisor outside the Oval Office.
00:10:33.020
I think there is, there has to be a recognition that both can be true, that the media did not cover
00:10:40.640
his decline as well as we all should have. And I'll just speak for myself as well as I wish I had.
00:10:47.460
And also the fact that a lot of this stuff was not obtainable until after the election, because the whole
00:10:56.100
conceit behind why this happened was because Joe Biden, his advisors, and to a large degree,
00:11:03.400
the entire Democratic Party bought into the argument that Donald Trump posed an existential threat to the
00:11:09.820
United States. Joe Biden was the only one who could defeat him. And therefore, anything that went after
00:11:15.980
Joe Biden would help Donald Trump. That argument, when you, when you convince yourself that you're,
00:11:21.940
that the enemy, if you're a Democrat, the enemy is Donald Trump, if you convince yourself that the
00:11:26.280
enemy is an existential threat, you can justify almost anything. And that's what I think they did.
00:11:31.940
And that's why it was so difficult to get them to talk until after the election, when they burst like
00:11:37.600
from a dam. It was, I've never seen anything like it.
00:11:41.440
Yeah. It was, it was the fact that Donald Trump was perceived to be an existential threat, which
00:11:45.280
he may yet prove to be, that's the, we are only four months or so into his administration, but.
00:11:51.520
That can't be right. It has to be like at least three years.
00:11:53.320
Yeah. It's, it's been a very long four months. But, um, the other crucial piece is that there was no
00:11:59.220
plan B, right? That they didn't perceive, uh, Harris to be viable and they were, for, and for reasons that
00:12:05.960
we'll talk about, the Bidens personally were clinging to the, um, campaign in a way that, um, you know,
00:12:13.360
really it was, it was theirs to relinquish and they weren't doing that.
00:12:17.580
And there was nobody to challenge it, nobody to challenge them. Nobody to say, sir, you really
00:12:21.960
should think about this. I have a very shabby business theory that applies to all aspects of
00:12:29.480
leadership, which, which is called the Jar Jar Binks theory, which is that powerful people rise to the
00:12:34.820
level where they can remove from their inner circle, anyone who tells them when they're making a mistake
00:12:39.180
or being an asshole. And the, the, the glib example is, is George Lucas putting Jar Jar Binks
00:12:45.700
in the Star Wars movies, the prequels, which is, I think, uh, a mistake.
00:12:51.800
Those movies have made billions of dollars. So it's a, it's a, it's flawed that way. But I could
00:12:55.540
say like, there are so many examples of this, of great men removing a great me in terms of
00:13:01.000
achievement, removing from their inner circle, anybody who would challenge them. And I think Joe Biden
00:13:07.400
is one of those people. I, I, you know, his top aides and advisors were people who worshipped
00:13:13.700
him, Steve Ruschetti and Mike Donilon specifically, they worshipped him. And I think that that really
00:13:20.640
was a mistake to have somebody, to not have somebody who could say, you're too old, you really
00:13:27.380
Well, what happened to his claim that he was a bridge to the next generation of leaders,
00:13:32.100
that he was a, by, by death, he was just explicit about this in his first term, that it was going
00:13:37.680
to be his first and, and only term. What happened to that? I mean, how, how was he not held to
00:13:44.100
that? How did he, I, I don't recall how he disavowed that in the end.
00:13:49.100
They did a, they did, it was, it was craftier than you're making it sound because you're, how
00:13:54.660
you're, how you're casting it is how we all took it.
00:13:57.520
Didn't he say he was going to be a one-termer? Didn't he say something about a bridge to the
00:14:00.900
next generation? He was just going to be one term. What actually, and I, this, I learned
00:14:04.940
this through writing this book because my impression was yours, but I'm like, why did
00:14:08.200
we think that? I went back. One, December, 2019, four different Biden advisors call Ryan
00:14:15.580
Lizza with Politico in what Ryan thinks was a strategic leak and tell him Biden's only going
00:14:21.860
to serve one term. Put it out there in the ether. December, 2019, before the primaries,
00:14:26.800
before the caucuses, just get it out there. Cause they know people are very concerned that
00:14:31.000
Biden's too old. So they get it out there. And then the event that you're talking about
00:14:35.400
this endorsement in Michigan in spring of 2024, when he's endorsed by Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala
00:14:42.440
Harris and Cory Booker, in which he uses the term bridge. And from that and media churn about
00:14:49.300
it, we all thought, oh, okay, he's only going to serve one term. But then the midterms go not
00:14:53.280
as bad as they were expected to go in 2022. And he just decides he's, there isn't any really
00:15:01.440
sort of process to talk about it. Nobody's there to challenge him. There's a pollster
00:15:06.820
named Johnny Anzalone who'd been with him since 1987, 1988, who's kind of like eased away out
00:15:13.560
of the inner circle for being something of a person who raises these uncomfortable subjects.
00:15:17.540
And he, he calls, um, and does a conference call with Anita Dunn in 2023, wanting to poll
00:15:23.820
on whether or not Joe Biden should run for reelection, just get the data out there.
00:15:28.320
And Anita says, we're not going to poll. The decision's been made. So there's, there's no
00:15:35.500
Yeah. And insofar as they did have polling data, it seems that they were not actually
00:15:43.880
Yeah. Another uncomfortable parallel to Trump, the level of that to which loyalty as in don't
00:15:51.780
deliver any bad news under any circumstances was prized in this administration is pretty
00:15:58.340
It's not just the administration. It is a source close to the Biden family told us this is part
00:16:06.060
of who they are. They are believers in their own myth. The theology of, of Joe Biden, like
00:16:13.580
any theology does not permit skepticism. And they have a family motto. Everybody's heard
00:16:19.060
the family motto. I give you my word as a Biden, a different family motto, less well-known is
00:16:24.160
never call a fat person fat, which means basically don't tell ugly truths. Don't share ugly truths.
00:16:32.540
And from that motto, the family lies to itself and the world about the tragic cancer diagnosis
00:16:40.080
of Beau Biden, which is kept secret. The family lies to itself in the world about Hunter's
00:16:45.720
struggle with addiction and it goes on and on. And I think that that is also one of the
00:16:51.180
Shakespearean flaws and, and, uh, aspects to this drama, which is one of the things that
00:16:55.980
people love about Joe Biden is his ability to, to pick himself up after life has just thrown
00:17:01.000
another fastball at him. And the guy has suffered more than anyone should in terms of all the
00:17:08.700
tragedies he's had throughout his life. And obviously we're all hoping and praying that
00:17:13.560
he'll survive this latest diagnosis of cancer. But that said, that belief in his ability to
00:17:24.180
Yeah. Yeah. So if we were going to be totally charitable to everyone who was complicit in this,
00:17:29.620
what really does amount to a cover up as well, as we'll show, I think, I mean, the way I thought
00:17:34.380
about it at the time and the way this interpretation has since unraveled after reading your book, but
00:17:39.300
at the time when you, even in the aftermath of the debate where it was just, you know, finally
00:17:44.520
revealed just how deep his, his deficits were, if I was being charitable to everyone around him,
00:17:50.240
who must've seen a fair amount of that before we saw it on television, I think there's this,
00:17:54.700
and I believe you talk about this in your book a little bit, there's this distinction between
00:17:58.920
the decision-making role and capacity of the president and the communication burden on him.
00:18:06.180
And certainly the communication burden on him that was really excruciating during any campaign for a
00:18:11.440
second term. And it's easy to see that someone could still maintain their competence in the former
00:18:18.340
while completely unraveling in the latter, right? Like, so you could imagine that, and I think,
00:18:22.720
you know, the testimony of people, again, going back years sort of reflected this where people
00:18:27.780
would say, you know, when I was with the president, you know, I had lunch with him or, you know, I was
00:18:31.500
in a, in a meeting with him and he was all there and he's just as wise about foreign policies he ever
00:18:37.560
was, et cetera, et cetera. And you can imagine that impression of him being compatible with and
00:18:43.940
surviving contact with a fair amount of stumbling and forgetting people's names and all the other,
00:18:49.900
you know, neurological signs of being old. So for, there's this period of a, you know, a gray area
00:18:56.740
where if you're being charitable, you could imagine how the people around him thought, all right, he's
00:19:02.540
still all there. This is not a risk to the country. The same person we've always known is still making
00:19:08.720
decisions about U.S. foreign policy or domestic policy. You just can't stick him in front of a
00:19:14.000
microphone and hope that he's going to perform. And when that gulf got wider and wider such that
00:19:20.260
any microphone is, you know, a high wire act that he's destined to fail spectacularly, then it just
00:19:28.980
became an untenable for him to campaign. But again, we're going to, I want to lead you into a discussion
00:19:34.740
of the her tapes and, and just how much this is, it turns out to not to kind of be a false
00:19:39.420
psychotomy. But what do you think about that framing? And was that your, the way you thought
00:19:47.400
So that was always the argument from the Biden people. He's fine behind closed doors. And also,
00:19:54.720
yeah, you know, he's not a great speaker and that's just always been the case. And I have a couple
00:19:59.900
thoughts on that. First of all, as one top aide said to me, and you paraphrased, being president
00:20:05.600
is basically two jobs. One is making big decisions. And the second is communicating those decisions to
00:20:11.600
the American people. And this aide said, and he was always good at the first, but he was never good
00:20:16.080
at the communication. And that got worse in his term. I would argue that the communication part of it is
00:20:21.860
just as important as the decision-making part of it because we are in a communication era. And as far
00:20:28.240
back as the advent of radio, a president's ability to, to communicate has been vital to his ability
00:20:35.640
to lead, to rally support for war, for peace, for legislation, for civil rights. I mean, it is an
00:20:43.380
important part of the job. So I disagree with the aspect of, of their argument. They kind of do this
00:20:50.020
cutesy dance where it's like performing as president versus performative as president. You know,
00:20:56.020
they think his ability to walk to Marine one is not as important as his ability to, you know, rally
00:21:02.120
NATO. And of course that's true, but no one's saying that the, that a president should have to,
00:21:08.560
that we have to choose between, you know, we should have to choose between a president who can
00:21:12.140
communicate and also can stand for the ideals, which we, we hold dear. There's also as by way of
00:21:18.760
explanation, not, it's not exculpatory, but Sam, you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 56. How old are you?
00:21:24.960
Uh, I got two years on you. Okay. 58. So you and I are familiar with Joe Biden's existence
00:21:31.440
since at least the nineties, right? Since at least the, uh, if not before when he ran for president in
00:21:36.760
1988. So I've, I've known of him since the eighties and he's always been gaff prone, long-winded,
00:21:45.220
says inappropriate things. Like that's always been him. Yeah. And so smelling people's hair. I mean,
00:21:52.300
who knows what's going on. That whole creepy little section was, it was its own thing. Yeah.
00:21:57.400
But that's always, so that what some aides said to us that during this era, when the non-functioning
00:22:03.860
Biden would rear its head 2019, 2020, and then it, and then he would show up more and more
00:22:10.380
non-functioning Biden that they weren't sure what was going on because a, he was old and that just
00:22:16.780
happens with older people. They lose a beat. B, he was always kind of prone to some of this
00:22:22.940
behavior, even when he was in fighting form, you know, long-winded, pointless stories and forgetting
00:22:28.500
names and such gaffes, lies, all those things. So that's, again, that doesn't exculpatory. It's
00:22:35.180
not exculpatory, but it is by way of understanding, like the complication of trying to figure out
00:22:39.660
wait, what a second, what exactly is going on here with this guy? Yeah. But our reporting suggested
00:22:44.580
that like after Bo died in 2015, one top aide said it was as if somebody had poured water
00:22:50.740
on his psyche, as if it were sand, like it just melted away. And then there were that I do, I do
00:22:58.800
think that's one of the reasons why Obama did not want him to run for president in 2016, because he was
00:23:03.200
just in no condition. He never fully returned to who he was. And I'm not making light of this. It's
00:23:10.080
a horrible, horrible tragedy to lose your son, but it did have a role in his acuity. And then we would
00:23:17.540
just hear like this non-functioning Biden would pop up on the campaign trail in 2019, 2020, and then
00:23:23.200
really start showing up a lot in 2023, 2024. Yeah. So there's some shocking details around that period
00:23:31.660
that we'll get to, but tell me about Robert Herr and his radioactive tapes. So now we've heard
00:23:38.140
them. And I think that they, they don't surprise, they didn't surprise me. If you'd like to continue
00:23:45.220
listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll
00:23:51.060
get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad free
00:23:56.660
and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.