Tapper & Thompson On The Biden Cover-up

They dug up a ton of depressing details on the denialist Dems. But not the media!

Jake Tapper is the lead DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN, whose books include The Outpost, The Hellfire Club, and The Devil May Dance. Alex Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and a political analyst for CNN. They just published Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

For two clips of our convo — on the deep dysfunction of the Biden family, and the blame Jill deserves for concealing Joe’s decline — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Alex leaving the Mormon Church after his dad’s ex-communication and a loss of faith; the cult-like loyalty of Biden’s aides; hiding Beau’s cancer; Hunter’s profound addiction; dating Beau’s widow and getting her on crack too; his emotional blackmailing of Joe; his influence peddling; his infamous laptop; Ashley Biden’s rehab and relapse; the Kennedys; the Bidens’ rift with the Obamas; Joe’s bitterness over Barack backing Hillary in 2016; the first signs of cognitive decline; the Covid election and razor-thin victory; his moderate campaign followed by a radical left agenda in office; Ron Klain’s woke influence; Mike Donilon’s greed and propaganda; “Jim Crow 2.0”; Joe preoccupied with foreign policy; inflation and Larry Summers; Jill addicted to the glamor of the White House; their disowning of a granddaughter born out of wedlock; Joe’s hubris and selfishness to run again; his delusions over polling; his disastrous debate; sticking with Kamala and sticking it to the Dems; the pillorying of Robert Hur; the media’s complicity in hiding Joe’s decline; the dissent of George Clooney, Ari Emanuel, and Dean Phillips; and the Bidens paving the way for Trump 2.0.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Chris Matthews — who just revived “Hardball” on Substack, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, and Johann Hari coming back to kibbitz for his fourth appearance on the pod. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

I joined another pod this week — Josh Szeps’ “Uncomfortable Conversations” — to talk about the history of the marriage movement and today’s transqueer craziness. Here’s a free preview of the first third of the episode:

Subscribe to Josh’s substack for the whole thing.

Speaking of Strayans, our recent episode with Claire Lehmann just got this comment:

Thanks for the Claire Lehmann conversation. I love her way of speaking clearly and without haste, and her ideas were original and well thought out. Your prompting questions were perfect.

From a fan of last week’s pod on Bill Buckley:

I couldn’t wait for your discussion with Sam Tanenhaus, whose 1997 biography of Whitaker Chambers is outstanding. His appearance on the Dishcast was much better than I had even hoped for. Thanks! More historians, please.

Another writes, “It’s rare to listen to a conversation that is both intellectually stimulating and a true delight.” And another:

I just spent my Saturday afternoon picking weeds and listening to your conversation with Sam, and I feel compelled to write because this was definitely one of my favorite interviews yet (and I’ve been a paid subscriber for years). Obviously a fascinating topic, but both of your delight in it (and Sam’s laugh!) kept me hooked.

You should do more of these longer interviews with friends. I felt like I was listening to a privileged discussion on a subject I should know more about. (Perhaps I do now?) I still don’t quite know after listening where Buckley would stand on Trump and the modern GOP, but I guess I should just read Sam’s book.

A dissent over the episode:

I’ve tried to quit emailing you, because my comments seem to end with snark, even though I enjoy your work. But your Buckley conversation itself was pretty snarky and petty. There was no grace extended to the man until the very, very end. Buckley had a big life, but the conversation seemed small. I can’t disagree with any points raised, but there was little balance.

I did, however, enjoy the grace note of Pat Buchanan’s letter to you at the end of the episode.

I didn’t feel that way about our chat. We both deeply admire WFB, especially as a decent human. And his influencer as a public intellectual? Remarkable. But not the kind of writer whose prose sings; and not the kind of independence that marked my true icons in the field: Orwell, Camus, Aron.

Another listener writes, “This is hardly a ‘dissent’ of any sort, but I hope you’ll read it”:

I mainly wanted to say what pleasure I found in hearing your conversation with Tanenhaus about old Buckley. Besides your advantages in both having known Buckley somewhat, it seemed to me that the two of you took real delight in trying to pin down his hypocrisies and puncture his (well-inflated) myth, but you were both glad to acknowledge what was good in the man, his personal generosities, etc. A provocative and engrossing discussion.

One suggestion: Tanenhaus, in passing, praised Matt Sitman (your old employee), Sam Adler-Bell, and John Ganz. I think any of those guys would make a great guest on the Dishcast. As a reader and listener of all three, I’ve found the mode of thought and conversation they follow to be really strongly reminiscent, somehow, of the qualities I’ve enjoyed in your own public work for decades now.

I do hope you will write your book about Christianity sooner than later. God bless you!

I’ve been meaning to ask Matt and Sam for a while, and your email promoted me to send a text. They’ll be on at some point, but not in the immediate future. And I’d never call Matt (or any Dish alum) an employee; he was a co-conspirator.

Here’s a long-time Buckley fan :

Your interview with Sam Tanenhaus was a special treat. Buckley was an early influence on me in the late 1950s and ‘60s. My Republican dad subscribed to National Review — I swear it came in a brown-paper wrapper to protect us from the Irish-Italian Democrats we lived among — and he watched Firing Line religiously every Sunday.

It was Buckley’s occasional name-droppings of Nock and Hayek and Mises in NR that introduced me to those libertarian giants, who led me to ditch Goldwater/Reagan conservatism and become a Ron Paul anarcho non-interventionist by 1976. During my journalism career, I had the pleasure of meeting Buckley in Pittsburgh in 1995 — he couldn’t have been nicer, and graciously helped me with my raincoat — and I did a long Q&A with him by phone a few months before he died in 2007. Both encounters are described here on my Substack.

By the way, please don’t dismiss Albert J. Nock so quickly as a snobby/cold aristocrat. Mencken didn’t hang with dummies, as you’ll find out quickly if you read Our Enemy, the State, or browse some of Nock’s essays in On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays. He was not a man of the people, to say the least, and he took libertarian/conservative positions that were hard-hearted and politically incorrect even a 100 years ago — but he was a great editor, a great writer, and a great individualist.

When I interviewed Buckley in 2007, I asked him about Nock:

Q: Has conservatism made a bargain with the state or with government power that it should not have made over the last 50 years? Has conservatism forgotten the message of Albert J. Nock’s seminal book, Our Enemy, the State?

A: The answer is, “Yes, it has.” Accommodations have been made, the consequences of which we have yet to pay for. Albert J. Nock, although he could express himself fanatically on these subjects, would certainly have pronounced these as major, major mistakes. So, the answer to your question is, indeed those excesses have been engaged in and they affect the probity of the conservative faith. […]

Q: You’ve always had a visible libertarian streak —

A: Yes.

Q: — whether it goes back to your admiration of Nock or your opposition to the war on drugs. Yet you and libertarians have always been feuding. Is there a simple way to summarize the most important argument between you and libertarians?

A: I suppose the most important argument is the dogmatic character of libertarian conservatism. I once wrote an essay on the subject in which I said that if I were at sea on my boat and saw a light flashing, I would not worry deeply whether the financing of that light had been done by the private or public sector. This became a kind of playful debate with the (University of) Chicago (economists). By and large, it has to do with the tenacity with which some libertarians tend to hold on to their basic (principles)

Q: Is conservatism compatible with a welfare-warfare state that consumes so much of our national wealth and controls so much of our daily lives?

A: It’s incompatible with a state that overdoes it. If the demands on the state required a devotion and a preoccupation with it to the point of standing in the way of people devising their own preferences and their own order of preferences, then you could say it was a mortal enemy.

P.S. It was great to hear you and Sam both praise Pat Buchanan as a great guy. I interviewed him several times by phone in the 2000s, and every time I called him, he treated me like we were old pals who had been golfing the day before. I interviewed scores of famous and important and smart and powerful people during my journalism career (including you briefly in the early 1990s), and I’ve always told people that happy/pleasant Pat Buchanan was my favorite “victim”. (Ralph Nader, not so much.)

Buckley’s relationship with libertarianism is basically my own. He was speaking my language here in the entire interview. Here’s one more clip from the episode — on Gore Vidal gay-baiting Buckley:

One more email on the Buckley pod:

I thoroughly enjoyed your interview with Sam Tanenhaus. I’ve been a Dishhead for a few years and rarely miss an episode. (I generally listen while taking our 85-pound Bernedoodle on his thrice-daily walks.) Over the past few months, after listening to Dishcast episodes, I’ve read Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying and Ross Douthat’s Believe — both of which were catnip to a 66-year-old lapsed Catholic trying to revive his faith. Although I will likely not read Mr. Tanenhaus’s tome — 1,000 pages is too long for me — I did want to share a Zelig-like encounter I had with Buckley that you may find amusing:

The first occurred in the mid-’70s when I was a student at Regis High School, an all-boys Jesuit school on the Upper East Side that offers a tuition-free education to Catholic boys from the metro NYC area. Many students commute to Regis from the outer boroughs and are the first in their families to attend college. (I was no exception, having grown up in Queens as the son of a letter carrier and a stay-at-home mom.)

Buckley would occasionally invite a group of Regians to attend tapings of Firing Line, and one afternoon, I found myself a member of such a group. The studio was small, and the set relatively sparse. There were two chairs — one for Buckley and one for his guest — and we sat cross-legged on the floor. While I couldn’t tell you who the guest was or the topic of the interview, my first impressions of Buckley are forever etched in my mind. With his patrician manner, facial ticks, and indecipherably ornate language, he seemed otherworldly to me.

Thanks again for all your wonderful work on the Dishcast. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin and look forward to his appearance on your show. While I’m enjoying the book, like many people, I am frustrated by Tapper’s “day late and dollar short” reporting. Please don’t go easy on him.

Well: you be the judge. I didn’t want to get into a media fight, and their book was not media reporting. But at the end, I did note my issues with the press corps and their herd-like cowardice and concern for what their peers think of them rather than for what readers deserve to know.

On last week’s column on Harvard and Trump, here’s a dissent from a reader who quotes me:

The independence of the university as a sanctuary for liberal learning is a foundational basis for a free society — as modern conservatives, Oakeshott above all, argued. No government should be able to intervene. That was the line between a free and an unfree society.

What a crock! The universities spent at least a decade descending into an ideological madness worthy of a Dostoevsky novel, and your proposed remedies are lawsuits and pleas to remember the importance of liberal norms and procedures.

Elite universities are many things, but truth-seeking entities is not one of them. They are, in no particular order: businesses, daycare centers for the children of the (global) rich, gatekeepers to high-income and/or high-prestige industries, jobs programs for radicals, and — write this on the blackboard a hundred times — political actors. Their administrators boast of training the next generation of leaders who will serve humanity (heaven forbid they prioritize their own country), professors play-act as paragons of expertise and probity when they comment on political issues, and students grow up to serve in high positions in business and government.

What happens on elite campuses inspires such fury in half the country because of the behavior of the people who populate said campuses. Here is a short list from just the last decade: double-standards about who could and could not speak on campus; no discipline for misconduct by left-wing students (who often form mobs — hello Yale!) — but right-wing students are threatened with career trouble for micro-aggressions (e.g. Traphouse-gate at Yale Law); double jeopardy and forced resignation for professors who have opposed wokeness (e.g. Joshua Katz at Princeton); intentional discrimination against Asian-Americans in admissions (Harvard) and conservatives in hiring (Princeton). Should I go on?

Oh, but it gets worse. There is a through-line between the lack of consequences for misbehavior on campus and the miseries of The Great Awokening. Critical theorists provided the ideas, and their graduates the HR muscle, for workplace struggle sessions in 2020. Campus cancellation artists joined tech companies and nonprofits that willingly partnered with the federal government to create the censorship-industrial complex. And these may only be premonitions of what is to come. Do you really think the Stanford law students who shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan — aided and abetted by a dean no less! — will have any interest in applying civil rights law fairly when they are middle-aged lawyers at DoJ?

The public has every right to demand punitive consequences for elite universities, not the least because of the failures of the model offered by you, Jonathan Rauch, and other right-liberals. Elegant essays about campus illiberalism and nonprofits dedicated to viewpoint diversity have amounted to a hill of beans. Elite universities will not change until they are forced, yes forced, to change.

You quoted Cato the Elder’s famous dictum about Carthage, but I suggest another Roman model should be applied to elite universities: Sulla and the proscriptions. The Trump administration should audit, blacklist, defund, sue, and tax elite universities until they accept deals that bind their administrators, professors, and students as tightly as a straitjacket.

I suggest the following terms: 1) 50% of trustees must be registered Republicans in perpetuity; 2) tenure may be revoked for any reason by a simple-majority vote of the board of trustees; 3) admissions and hiring policies will be public and any employee found to have engaged in discriminatory practices will be fired; 4) any student found in violation of the code of conduct will have his disciplinary record(s) made public; 5) any student who commits a crime against persons or property will be charged and prosecuted in federal court; 6) failure to comply with any of the above provisions will trigger fines no less than 20% of the value of the endowment; and 7) any university that repeatedly violates these provisions will lose its tax-exempt status for no less than ten years.

If elite universities will not submit, then Trump should turn them into deserts and call it peace.

I guess this is the post-liberal view. I’m mad at Harvard as well. I do want them punished for race discrimination; to have a student body 14 percent black after removing affirmative action is statistically close to impossible. I also think federal funding can be made contingent on more viewpoint diversity in faculty and curricula — or even any viewpoint diversity. But direct government control of universities, as my reader recommends, is a terrible idea in a free society.

More recommended reforms come from this reader:

When I imagine a much better Trump, I don’t imagine a SJW as the far left would. or even a Main Street Republican a la Romney; I envision a Trump who legislates some much needed counterbalance to the far left.

I would disallow student loans to colleges and universities that discriminate against any race, sex, religion or sexual preference, including straight white guys. On this you appear to agree, and the left has done the same to force DEI onto colleges, so fair is fair.

I would also limit “overhead” for research grants to 10% and require the university to provide a full accounting of how they spent that money. (Far too much of that money gets siphoned away from research and into administrative costs, including DEI administrators.)

I’d also withhold student loans from colleges and universities who have a larger administrative load (money spent on administration vs. on professors teaching students) than the average in 2000 — heck, if I thought it would be possible, 1980. One of the two main drivers of the increase in the cost of college is the mind-boggling increase in administrative load. At my wife’s own university, the number of six-figure administrators has simply exploded. The old college president had one assistant; the new one has five. Ditto the second in command.

I’d go further and restrict student loans to particular degrees and withhold them from particular low-end schools, but I suspect that would be too far for you — though I also suspect many working-class voters would agree that paying for C students to get a degree in 13th century French poetry, or any of the grievance degrees (women’s/race-specific/sexual orientation/etc) is a waste of government money. Mind you, offering those courses is fine, but a degree in activism isn’t something that the government should be funding.

I would love to have a requirement for viewpoint diversity, but that is probably a step too far. Though maybe there is a way to give the parents of incoming students some metric of just how ideologically captured the schools their children are looking at are, so they can exert some economic influence on universities to be more ideologically inclusive — or less bat-shit crazy, at least.

The massive over-spending and administrative load really are worth tackling. But federal pressure need not be crude or entirely coercive. Another critique of higher ed:

Universities don’t only suck because of the culture war crap that you, Chris Rufo, and others have documented. They suck in far more fundamental ways.

Insufficient monetary incentives and agency problems mean the profs are lazy, and tenure only makes them worse. As for education itself, it’s just as Bryan Caplan describes: a massively inefficient signaling racket. Students forgo on-the-job training and four years of compounded savings (worth millions later in life) in order to tick boxes, party, and accumulate taxpayer-subsidized debt.

Yes, universities contribute towards STEM, but that contribution would yield far more under market forces. If “pure research” has value, let the private sector put a price on it by investing in R&D. Where would Terence Tao contribute more to humanity: cosseted away at UCLA or making millions at Anthropic? Meanwhile, the non-STEM contributions of universities mostly consist of wordcel games that can already be effortlessly mimicked by AI.

Even if Trump fails to smash the universities, technology and competition will make them redundant within a decade. AI will catalyze the great labor market disintermediation. Credentialism, cronyism, interviews, and DEI will be replaced by IQ tests, paid apprenticeships, and project-specific online gigs.

I sure hope that liberal learning is not made redundant in a decade. Because it is never redundant in a free society. It’s the equivalent for a democracy as lungs are to breathing.

Yet another critique:

As a graduate of Stanford with family members that graduated from Harvard, I am not prepared to take Harvard’s side in this dispute. Both sides are filled with spite, and isn’t clear who (if anyone) is acting in the public’s interest.

Harvard (and my alma mater, in similar and different ways) willingly participated in some incredibly spiteful endeavors the past few years: the re-racialization of America, the suppression of debate (including in coordination with the government), intimidation of Jews, etc. They have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their errors and seem to be digging trenches to defend these spiteful positions.

Do both sides recognize that they may be playing a variant of the prisoner’s dilemma? If both sides persist, America is much worse off, but if both relent, perhaps there is a way to reach a reasonable settlement that addresses the public’s concerns while maintaining independence from the government?

Trump has proven previously willing to deal, but Harvard seems to believe itself endowed with infallibility.

A conservative Harvard grad refuses to give up on the place:

Like yourself, I was one of a tiny handful of embattled conservatives when I enrolled in Harvard’s freshman class of 1964. Hardly anyone I knew shared my enthusiasm for Barry Goldwater — not even the Harvard Republicans, the only non-left political organization on campus. During my four years there, I heard conservatives ridiculed, hissed, and shouted down by my overwhelmingly left-leaning classmates and faculty. I witnessed visiting speakers disrupted by violent protests. I saw New Left protesters march through the streets denouncing “Amerika,” praising Ho Chi Minh, and espousing violent revolution. Their ideas were in fact more treasonous and anti-American than those of today’s pro-Palestinian protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza — an affair in which the US is mainly a bystander.

Like yourself, I cringed at the smug self-righteousness and liberal hypocrisy at Harvard. In the end, though, Harvard gave me an excellent education, and listening to opposing ideas honed my intellect. I was glad to graduate before the student strike of 1969, which disrupted classes over a war that was none of Harvard’s doing. In subsequent years, I was increasingly estranged by Harvard’s grade inflation, lowering of academic standards, politicization of coursework, embrace of intolerant “wokeism,” and constitutionally indefensible, racialist admissions policy.

Thankfully, I have recently been heartened to see that Harvard’s new president, Alan Garber, has taken meaningful steps to rectify these problems. Now, I don’t expect Harvard to become a bastion of conservatism again — the way it was before FDR. However, I am supremely thankful to President Garber and Harvard for challenging Trump’s unprecedented attempts to interfere in the governance of American universities. If there’s one thing that us Goldwater conservatives believed in, it was limited government, less presidential power, and freedom from government interference in private affairs.

Amen & Fight fiercely, Harvard!

Next up, a local spat continues:

The reader who emailed you the following “correction” doesn’t — in my Irish-born dad’s vernacular — “know his ass from a hole in the ground”:

Pope Leo is not from the “South Side of Chicago”; he’s from a south suburb called Dolton. My cousin and her family lived about six blocks away from him and would never say they lived in any part of Chicago. Folks who live in the suburbs of Chicago are very proud of their towns. Just FYI.

I grew up in Dolton about 1.5 miles SE of Pope Leo. (He lived down the street from the Dolton Theater, which was a big deal then.) I also grew up in his Catholic parish and attended the school — which is in CHICAGO. The suburbs of Dolton and Riverdale are directly across the street from the closed church and school.

(The Pope and I didn’t attend at the same time, as I’m younger than him, but I was aware of his mom, who was very active in the parish and was the school librarian. She had a bit of a theatrical bent and appeared in parish plays.)

People from Chicago suburbs typically just claim to be from Chicago. In the case of Dolton and nearby suburbs, that’s legitimate; but with more distant suburbs, it can be problematic. In any case, the working-class Dolton that he grew up in and partly studied is essentially Chicago.

One more email for the week:

TNR covers from 1992

Decades ago, for my weekly column on magazines for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I called up editors of think mags like you. I just dug up my 1992 interview with the very young you, and here’s what you/we said:

The New Republic

Bright, readable, current, clever, the magazine’s politics can be perceived as either neoliberal or neoconservative, depending on where the viewer stands. Current star among the think mags, it’s home base for neoliberal Michael Kinsley and ace political profilist Sidney Blumenthal. But articles these days are just as likely to come from Wall Street Journal editorial writers as liberals. Circulation: 100,000; $70 for 48 issues; (800) 274-6350.

The word that editor Andrew Sullivan uses to describe his magazine’s politics is “post-ideological.” The whole left-right thing is over, says the 28-year-old, openly gay Brit. “What we’re about is trying to work through what comes next.”

Sullivan — only about six months into his editorship — says the notion that the New Republic has recently moved from left to right is as inaccurate as the belief that it’s become stuck in the political middle.

The New Republic is unpredictable, unstodgy and risk-taking, he says, which is why it’s been getting flak from all camps. It aims to reach — and persuade — the growing number of independents. Sullivan thinks his magazine may be the most influential political magazine of the day because “we’re in the business of persuading people who disagree with us.”

“Other magazines are in the business of telling their readers what they want to hear. We’re always treading on toes and taking risks — that makes us more influential. Our position is noticed while the Nation and National Review’s positions are predictable.” As for whom he’d appoint president, he couldn’t say.

Good times. Those covers really took me back. That Matt Groening endorsement!

Thanks as always for the emails, especially the dissents, which you can send here: dish@andrewsullivan.com. See you next Friday. Off to walk Truman …

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