Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar12/27/24: BOMBSHELL: WSJ Reveals Biden Decline Coverup
Krystal and Kyle discuss bombshell reporting that Biden’s age concerns were covered up.
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Hey guys, for my podcast with Kyle recorded a great interview with Matt Brunnig from the People's Policy Project. Got into a lot about healthcare and some of the lives that have been spread recently, but also got his reaction to this New Wall Street Journal reporting about how Biden's aids hit him and lied to the public about the state of his decline. Enjoy this interview, and if you do like it and want the full thing and to get our interviews every single week, you can subscribe on substack. We'll have the link down below for you in any case, enjoy. Matt, I want zoomount a little bit to talk to you about the Biden administration, the legacy. I saw you tweeting about this Wall Street Journal article that just came out where I don't know if you've seen it yet, babe, but they've got all these details of the links that his aides went to, Oh I did see this yet to cover up his incredible decline. They begin with this anecdote of Michael Lo Rosa out there touting the first lady, Jill Biden, like her campaign schedule and how she'd been to so many places in Iowa, and the staff was pissed at him because they're like, well, in contrast, this makes Joe Biden look terrible because you can't really do anything. So obviously there's the age and declined part. But I also, yeah, and I'd love to get your reaction just to that piece, Matt, because you were saying, and it is incredible they knew all this, and yet they still decided to go forward with him. They still decided, Hey, it's a good idea for you to get out there and debate Donald Trump. Like none of us can really know what was going on in their minds. But did they just they just didn't think there was any choice but to sort of march go forward on this death march? Were they send it a failure?
They did the debate early in case something like this happens, they could try to pull the plug, right, Yeah, I don't have the theory.
I don't know what do you what do you read into all about mat Yeah?
I mean it's hard to figure out the mixture of things, right, because Biden is making decisions, and so maybe on some level, you know, if Biden wants a debate, he's going to debate. There's nothing you can do to make him not debate. But the individual staffers also make decisions, right, So that's the part I don't If I'm an individual staffer and I see the situation as it is as we all now understand it, why wouldn't I do something, say something. I mean, you could resign, you could do whatever, right to make a big fuss about it, especially if you think, as so many seem to, that Trump was this sort of existentially, you know, horrible figure that we needed to avoid, and you're going to play this game where somehow we're going to hide Biden. But then he's also going to win an election without what because it's not even just the debate, right, that was a singular moment, but debate elections involved a tremendous amount of public appearances and interviews and whatever, and you're not going to be able to hide him away from that. So I don't I don't know. I find that that whatever the thought process involved in all that very very strange. And to say even okay, well so we had the debate early, Well you need to be thinking about this before the primary, right because oh, well, he can bow out after the debate. And then what we're left with Harris, who at that point had been a very unsuccessful politician. I mean, you know, she's a senator, but presidentially she'd done very very poorly. So yeah, I don't know, a lot of bad decision making in that.
And then yeah, they ka cooned Biden's closest aids, coconed him to hide him and to protect him from public scoreol. And then the other people who were in contact with him was probably limited. And then if you think about all the incentive structures, it makes it so that it's just like, hey, shut up, don't say anything. If you resign and you try to virtue signal about how this is a problem, you're immediately going to be castigated as you're like a you know, a right wing op. You don't have a future in any democratic politics anymore. So, like all of the incentive structures are there to just kind of force everybody to don't ask, don't tell. Right, It's like it don't ask, don't tell policies.
I mean, his circle of advisors has been the same since like nineteens.
Right, And they're willing to lie for him. They're willing to lie for him.
As family members, right, and yeah, and you know there's lots of reporting about how he didn't want to hear any negative news and so they didn't bring him.
And by the way, Trump was the same way, right, Like it's funny that the ego there are.
Yeah, there are some Trumpian characters er.
Hear anything negative to show me Trump famously, so that would say, show me the good things and have it like on one page and big font. They have to have his name in the briefing in order for him to be like that's right, Trump, I like this.
And since you already have this very narrow circle of longtime advisors established with very few you know, people who have been able to penetrate that in the past couple of years. If you're someone who has any kind of an inn, you know that the minute you tell him something he doesn't want to hear, you're out. And so he surrounds himself with yes men and women, and then you know, creates self, creates this bubble, and then that's reinforced by the aid's desire to hide from the public and even from like cabinet secretaries and members of Congress what's going on. And it's in everybody's self interest to perpetuate this thing right up into the point where it's it's not possible. There's an anecdote in here. They say, if the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion the spring of twenty twenty one, twenty twenty one, people were talking about Here a national security official explain to another AID why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. Quote, he has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day, so we're going to address this tomorrow. Like so, it does raise a lot of questions about how many people around him knew the state of this decline, and as you said, Matt, like some of them I guess maybe earnestly believed what they were saying about Trump being this genuine threat, and yet they're so terrified I think of any kind of an actual democratic process that they just like push forward anyway in spite of really knowing what's going on.
I feel like a bigger problem is the media, right, because it really was on the media to sort of be like, Okay, we got issues here and take the candidate seriously. You know, the people who ran Mary Williamson, ran, Dean Phillips ran like there were the door was opened a little bit, right, but the media shut them all out, didn't talk about them, made them seem ridiculous. And obviously all the governors who had a chance, like Gavin Newsoon and all of them, they sort of found and mid terms were decent. Yeah, but like, don't I'm curious what you think, Matt, was it was a bigger problem the media and this whole thing for not taking challengers to Biden seriously or reporting.
Yeah, that's the that's the media failure. I'd focus on more than anything. I remember Olivia Newsy had a piece shortly after kind of this all went down with the debate, where I mean, she basically is indicating that, you know, she's known that he's had trouble for a while, she's been covering him, and and she kind of then lays it all out and that's all well and good. But then you know, you kind of look at it and you think, well, Olivia, maybe you should have written about this a year ago when you seem to have indicated you had knowledge of it, and there had to be a number of media people who had some kind of information about it. It seemed like partially what happened among liberal media is they just decided that this was like a.
Fox News lie. I remember there was a what was it? It was? They had a special counsel to investigate.
Uh oh that's right, Yeah, they classified doc Robert Hurt.
Oh yes, yes, and this dude was like, yeah, he's an old man who means well, but damn his brain is not working. Everybody was like sir, yeah, yeah.
He specifically was saying, look, I don't know if we should bring charges against him for the mishandling of these documents, because like he's he's really not there. And I remember I actually remember Atglesias was so incensed by this, and I thought it was a decent point at the time. I mean, I thought, you know, to get my cards on the table. I wrote something in Political in twenty twenty during the or twenty nineteen, during the dim primary then that that Biden was his mind was gone. But you know, it was sort of like, oh, what a clever thing this. They couldn't find enough evidence to charge him, so instead they're going to spear him and say that he's just completely gone. And you know, I don't know, just this sort of desire to think, well, that's a right wing smear, that's a right wing smear, that's a right wing smear, I think kept people from looking at the reality and reporting it correctly.
That happened with Julian He was like, did you just forget the thing you said five seconds ago? And it was something that us Bernie people at the time were kind of pointing out, like, hey man, he lost his fastball at the very least. But it was just maybe that's part of the problem is that everybody dismissed it then and he won the election, so it sort of felt like, well, I guess they were being hyperball, like if the guy could win, obviously his brain's working good enough, right, and so then but then everybody like time continues.
Yeah, well, and there's also there's also a question.
I mean, it seems pretty clear that you don't have to be fully there cognitively to be president, you know, so in a way, you could kind of I could see someone reasoning like, well, who cares, Like we had Trump and we had Biden, Reagan had Alzheimer's or something like that.
You know, one, really it's not really that necessary.
But the problem is that even though it seems like it doesn't, really it's not strictly necessary, when voters realize that you're that way, that turns them off, So it becomes necessary.
Don't look like a yeah, you're having like a bowl of mush shit?
What does that say about us as a country? That he's right like that? People were like, yeah, maybe his brain doesn't work, but like whatever.
His strongest defenders at the end were like Bernie and AOC.
You remember that political calculation is what that was. Yeah, I mean I think it was that.
But I think also ideologically, like on an idea, like we got Lena Khan and this transition I do want to hear your your thoughts, matt On. Kind of like the Biden economic legacy. We got Lena Khan, We got Jennifer Bruzzo at the NLRB, who was fantastic. You know, we got some industrial policy and a few things that are like a legitimate, minor but legitimate break with the neoliberal era. And with Kamala you were less likely to get those things. So I do think that was part of the calculus with them too, is like, I don't really care that his brain is cooked. At least who got Lena.
We also got Gaza, and that is enough of an excuse for them to tell the truth, right.
Sure, I'm not man, Yes, I'm just trying to explain the thinking because it's Kamalaly also gave no indication that she was cool.
Well, they going to break with Biden Onza, He's not stepping down. I've heard him say it a thousand times. He's not going to step down, So everybody just shut the fuck up and accept it. I think that was their thinking. If Biden wins, then will have his ear because we're the ones who defended him.
Yeah, No, I think the I think the because I remember for a while, it wasn't even clear it was going to be Harris that would take over. There was a lot of you know, when they were saying all that, no one knew what would happen. But I think the assumption there from Bernie world, you know Bernie specifically, not like you know, his fans, but was Look, Biden very very clearly is not going to step down. He has made this so clear. So here's a little moment where kind of the center is abandoning him and they're calling on him to step down. We know he's not going to, so what if we kind of, you know, suck up get close to him? And he did actually adopt some of their policies. I remember in that innert brief period after the debate before he dropped out, they got him to endorse national rank control.
So you know, I I forgot about that. You remember that, I totally forgot about it. By the way, to your point, guys, it's kind of weird that Iglesias was such a big defender of Biden, given that Iglesias has made crystal clear that his politics economically are much more like a Bill Clinton or Barack Obama than a Joe Biden. So why was he such we shouldn't he have been arguing that Biden has gone too far left on economic issues? You know what I'm saying, Like it's not even ideologically they're actually not lined up. Yeah, but he still was like one of his biggest defenders. What do you make of that?
You know, I don't know. Glaciers has a complicated views. You know, at some level.
He wrote the One Billion Americans book, you know some Yeah, and then and.
Now it's like you people like immigration too much? Hold the phone here, buddy.
Yeah. Yeah, he just pretended like he didn't write the book.
But that is not How do you see uh in terms of the economic legacy? You know, it's always difficult to just be like put aside the genocide, but you know, on some of the economic pieces, do you see Biden as sort of transitional figure that the parallel that often comes to mind is like a Jimmy Carter, who was this transitional figure between like the New Deal era and the neoliberal era, And I do think Joe Biden in some ways occupies that same sort of space. How significant do you see some of the breaks being, you know, from neoliberalism? Do you think where did that come from like, was that just like ron Klain? Was it Bernie Sanders influence? Was it just that's where the center of the party was now and sort of where the world is moving? What do you make of some of those pieces?
Yeah, so what happened there? I think on the administrative agency front, what seems to have happened with someone like Lena Kahan or Canter is that if you recall in the twenty twenty primary, Warren kind of didn't really endorse Bernie when she dropped out, which was a little bit of a blow because now it was sort of like the left block. It seemed like she was given essentially, I don't know if a literal dispensation for that or what, but she seemed to have been allowed to select the FTC chair and some of these other administrative cabinet level officials. So that seems to be what happened there, right in the same way that buddhach Edge became Department of Transportation secretary, Warren's dispensation for her behavior in the election was that she got to pick those nominees, So you know what have we So it was always very funny like are we talking about Biden administration?
Are we talking about Biden himself.
Biden Himself's mind is so gone, what do we even You know, it's always just sort of like which puppet is is or which puppeteer is running which piece of this puzzle. The other thing he did would have been kind of run the economy hot, this sort of like macro economic stimulus stuff that seemed to be coming out of what was just kind of the consensus liberals to progressive opinion on what happened after two thousand and eight, which is that Obama did not pass a big enough stimulus and that kept the economy depressed for a decade, and so they're trying to learn the lessons from that and that, I mean, you could find that pretty much anyway in any of the kind of center left to left policy world, and that's where he would have staffed his agency, staffed his administration with those same kind of people, whether it's Center for American Progress, Roosevelt people like that. So that there's that part of it industrial policy and then.
And then climate right.
So I don't know, these just sort of these strands that he picked up, and it's kind of hard in retrospect to know how much he was hip to it or what exactly was going on, but it seemed to be he managed to get the people who managed to control him were people who were, you know, of those various policy sort of persuasions.
One of the things I fear is that the Infrastructure Bill and the IRA and the Chips Act, and like the lasting positive implications of that, that that's all going to happen under the Trump presidency and Trump will just hop in front of that parade and pretend like it was his tax cuts for the rich that did it or something, you know. So it makes me fear like, you know, a backslide, a potential backslide.
It.
We have this debate like long ago about whether or not the neoliberal era was actually coming to an end, and my case was that because of the deleterious impact of money and politics, it basically locks in a sort of neoliberal era because the politicians are always going to default doing what their donors want them to do, which is always neoliberal. And it makes me wonder, like, let's assume for a second, a Democrat wins in twenty twenty eight, which is very possible considering how batchit crazy, this administration is going to be a let's say you get a Gavinusomer pe Buddha Jedge, just to play it safe at the moment, because probably one of the more likely things happen. Are they going to be more inclined to just revert back to Obama style economics, or are they going to be more inclined to either copy a Biden's style or potentially even go further than a Biden side. I don't know the answer to that, and I'm curious what you guys.
Yeah, it No, the primary is going to be very interesting in this respect. Obviously, I'm on the hunt for who's going to carry the left torch as it's not going to be burning this this go around. But that seems like it's, you know, it's gonna it's really unclear where things are going to go, especially because you had Biden, which did who did one thing, and then as Crystal was pointing out, the the Harris in her campaign did something quite different. So even his successor who was the VP, went a whole other route with it.
There seemed to be this.
Blip that for a while in kind of election world that you know, we need to run it a certain way, focus on a few specific popular issues, like abortion access whatever, and keep everything, you know, everything else kind of under wraps and tacked to the right, be more conservative, say some negative things about immigration, go on TV and pretend like you have a gun.
And like stuff like that.
Like that was.
Like that was a little moment, but it failed. So but you know, is it Why did it fail?
I don't.
I don't know, Like it's very unco like we don't have a success. Biden is gone, Harris did something completely different Obama's way in the rear view mirror. Bernie didn't succeed in the primary. He had a kind of an exciting moment like so, who I have no idea.
I don't think.
Anyone maybe and maybe that's why we're having there's so many debates now about is the problem the groups or was the problem David.
Shore, like what's the what's the issue?
You know?
I just hope that they don't take the worst possible lesson, which is like how could you run on that six thousand dollars child tax credit? That was a bad idea. That's way too much money.
I mean, it's a little bit of that out there. I mean there is like crazy. I'm sort of I hate to keep it bringing out Matt Iglacias. But one of the points that he and others in his lane are sort of raising is, look, Biden did all this stuff you people wanted them to do, and the economy was like, people didn't love it. It was unpopular. So I guess you were wrong about like supporting labor rights and anti trust policy and like these more left wing type policy ideas. I mean, that is one argument that's being made. Another argument that's being made right, like immigrants you should, yeah, I just like throw trans people under the bus, adopt Trump's like you know, hawkish border cruelty she did, which she did, and that's what she did.
Yeah, yeah, the moderation on what you might think of more cultural type issues if you include immigration, and then paired down her she was not economically and but she did all those things.
But then I think some people.
You know what what back in twenty twenty she said a thing on a questionnaire in an interview and people still remember that, and so that's why she lost, which I mean, like, obviously I think this argument is incorrect because also at the same time, when you are at sort of like peak wokeness, Biden wins. So wouldn't you think that the wokeness destroying the Democratic Party would have been a factor at the time when it was that like peak woke wokeness on the the
Whateverstometer, the peak wokeness on the wilmeter,
