Robert Costa On a Wild DNC, Kamala’s Big Moment, and Lingering Anger Over Biden’s Exit

Michele Crowe/CBS

A teenage Robert Costa first started reporting on music in Bucks County, Pennsylvania mostly to score free concert tickets. Now, he is the chief election and campaign correspondent for CBS News — and one of the sharpest political reporters and analysts there is. He’s been at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago all week, and spoke with Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin about a week that culminated in the coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential nominee.

It’s been a singular period in American politics, and many commentators predicted — if not outright expected — division and unrest among the Democratic base after President Joe Biden stepped down from the top of the ticket over his disastrous debate performance. But Costa said it was “clear” to him that not only were Democrats expressing positive feelings about their convention and their new ticket, they had a focus on the work ahead and a commitment to put aside “any grievances” that might still remain over Biden’s ouster or policy differences, in order to unite and defeat former President Donald Trump .

On August 11, Costa scored the first sit-down interview with Biden after he dropped out. “You read about presidencies when they end, but these are human beings. When you pull something out in life that has such deep roots, there’s going to be some pain,” he said. “When I talk to the old school Democrats, there is pain, and there’s a little concern that no one wants to talk about it publicly.”

With the transition from Biden to Harris, the Democrats’ campaign went from a candidate voters indicated they had wearied of, to one who polling showed many Americans were less sure where she stood on issues — and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz , was almost a total unknown. In Costa’s assessment, the DNC was a crucially important moment for Harris to reintroduce herself to the country, and for America to meet Walz for the first time.

“Almost nobody, in terms of voters I’ve encountered, knew much about Walz until now,” Costa said. “And they see a guy whose family clearly loves him, you see someone who is a teacher, who has the support of a lot of his former students, who has a folksy demeanor. By picking Tim Walz they reassure the industrial Midwest that they’re being seen.”

While he says the Harris campaign feels very confident about this convention, and even about their shot at the popular vote, they are not getting ahead of themselves. “That’s what Tim Walz was saying. Sleep when you’re dead because the Democrats have been burned before getting a little too confident that Trump is somehow diminished.”

Costa also spoke about the deluge of celebrities and important Democratic figures who have appeared on stage, what he believes most impacted Biden’s decision to step down, and his phone call earlier this week with former President Donald Trump .

Mediaite’s Press Club airs Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , or Spotify . Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

What is your major takeaway from the events this week?

You see the Democratic Party trying to come together at a moment where that can sometimes be a tricky endeavor. President Biden was the story of the convention on Monday night, and then they pivoted to starting to introduce Governor Walz, and then ultimately Vice President Harris to the country.

And there’s been this projection of unity — the entire convention, and also an aversion to defining the ticket and the party in strictly liberal ways. There’s a nonpartisan overture that’s evident in so much of the proceedings to try to make it politically palatable and possible for Republicans and centrists and independents to consider the Harris/Walz ticket in comparison to former President Donald Trump. And you see the echoes of the past in former President Bill Clinton and others, with President Obama, Michelle Obama. And also you see with Oprah Winfrey and other celebrities, this push to frame the election in a moral sense that’s neighborly versus strident or ideological.

And we’ll see if it works. We’ll see if it’s effective. But one thing that is clear to me as a reporter is talking to Democratic officials, Democratic delegates, they feel good about this convention. They think they’re going to get a bump. They know there’s a lot of work to do. And an undercurrent is there’s still some work to do with labor, in particular, to make sure that part of the Biden coalition remains part of the Harris coalition. There’s a confidence that it will. But that, to me, is the most intriguing point of concern I’ve picked up on. They want to make sure that the everyday worker, especially if they’re a member of a labor union, a teachers union, a public sector union, a private sector union, that they come along. But beyond that, it’s this transition moment where everyone’s trying to, almost like a family reunion, stay on the same page and not let any grievances that are there for some, especially close to President Biden, bubble to the surface and disrupt the proceedings.

How does this convention stack up against others you’ve covered before, in terms of the mood in the room and the way people feel about the candidates?

It stacks up in different ways to history and also the things I’ve covered. In history, I wasn’t there of course, but in 1968, Lyndon Johnson exits the race as the Democratic president. He says he doesn’t want to be nominated on March 31st, 1968. And that leads to this tumult at the convention in Chicago. And I spoke to Bill Daley, the son of the late Mayor Richard Daley, who was the famous or infamous mayor at the time, depending on whom you ask. He was mayor when the police had these brutal confrontations with anti-war protesters. And there was also this tension at the convention in ’68, anger about the war. This has that same kind of disruption. There’s not a war that’s hanging over this convention in the sense of American troops being deployed abroad. But there is certainly frustration among some of the Democratic delegates and activists about the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war with Hamas. And they would like to see more of a recognition of that issue on stage.

But in terms of the things I’ve covered in the past, this reminds me, in a sense, of the Obama ’12 convention, where you had in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Democratic Party really blowing itself toward that Obama coalition, trying to get suburban voters this upbeat message, this selling of an incumbent Democratic administration. Harris, of course, is not the incumbent, but she is the incumbent vice president of the incumbent president. And this is the party apparatus that’s in power coming together, coupled together with this Obama group of advisers, allies, donors that have always been part of the Biden world but have not been directly as influential when President Biden and his advisers were running everything.

So you have this revival of the Obama people, with the Biden remainders who are there and certainly part of this campaign. And the Harris coalition is all part of that. And she has a pretty tight-knit inner circle. So it’s not like the personalities around her are becoming these huge figures at the convention. There’s no James Carville to Harris, at least in the public imagination at this point — there might be down the line. But I see a Democratic power structure that’s in power, trying to sustain itself in power by rethinking how it approaches its message and argument to the country.

We’re in this spectacular sprint to Election Day, particularly for the Harris campaign, which has had to mount a presidential campaign in a matter of weeks. Do Democrats think they can win?

The Harris campaign is feeling very confident. But there’s also this lingering sense of “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Here’s how some of the Harris advisers I’ve spoken with privately at the convention talk about it. They look at this momentum for Vice President Harris, and they see a real opportunity for her to win the popular vote, just like Secretary Clinton did in 2016, just like President Biden did in 2020. They expect her to do very well with the popular vote, blue states are going to turn out in record numbers they feel in certain places for her and for Tim Walz.

But at the same time, the election, of course, is won through the Electoral College. And this election, if you look at the polling, it’s as tight, really within margins, as it’s ever been in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin — and the industrial Midwest is going to decide potentially this election, along with Georgia and Arizona. And so they’re really trying to make a play here by having the former Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, on stage, by picking Tim Walz to reassure the industrial Midwest that they’re being seen, they’re heard, they got a former school teacher on a ticket from the Midwest who’s not wealthy, who speaks the language of the Midwest.

And Jen O’Malley Dillon, who was running the Harris campaign, who was running the Biden campaign, was telling reporters this week that at the end of the day, they need to get all the traditional Democratic constituencies out in record numbers in these battleground states to be competitive. And it’s going to be a slog, despite Trump’s challenges, despite Trump’s zig-zag in messaging, and his postings that sometimes veer into controversy. They still see an election that’s very, very close and very, very tight.

So they know that having Oprah on stage and other celebrities, and President Obama, former First Lady Michelle Obama, former President Clinton, to have all these people there, it helps. It gives her this imprimatur of Democratic success that’s now part of her campaign and this energy. But Donald Trump has won before, and he has surprised by scoring an inside straight through the industrial Midwest, by appealing to people who sometimes express their support for him quietly rather than in polling or to their neighbors.

Whenever I see the crowd go wild here for Oprah or John Legend, I find myself thinking, this is a lot of momentum for Democrats, but I’m brought down to earth by the reminder that a bunch of celebrities supported and performed at the DNC in 2016, and we all know how that ended. Do you think that the momentum and the star power that we’re seeing here is going to have any effect in the polls?

I don’t think the celebrity stuff matters as much. I think Oprah never hurts. I’ve been covering Oprah actually in her political standing for years. When I was at The Washington Post , I used to talk to her confidants. People used to think about drafting Oprah to run for president. That was a mini beta carved out, just keeping tabs on efforts to get her to run for president years ago. What you see here, what makes this different than 2016 and that energy around Secretary Clinton and her historic candidacy, is in Secretary Clinton, and I encountered this constantly when I was covering her in 2016 on the road, voters had a hardened view of her. She had been in the public sphere for decades. She had been forefront nationally since January of 1993 as a first lady, really since ’92 in that campaign. So people had really strong views about her that they held on to and they were not willing to budge a lot.

With Governor Walz and with Vice President Harris, you have an opportunity for Democrats to make their case and to introduce themselves without having a really hardened view. Almost nobody, in terms of voters I’ve encountered, knew much about Walz until last night. And they see a guy whose family clearly loves him, you see someone who is a teacher, who has the support of a lot of his former students, who has a folksy demeanor. So he was able to hit his marks and to hit the marks that Democrats needed him to do, to come across as a compelling, new figure on the national scene. And because the country didn’t know him, it was both an opportunity and a risk to pick Governor Walz.

And a lot of Democrats I spoke with on Thursday morning were feeling very good because they liked Walz. They thought he was being effective on the trail. But you never really know until the speech happens. Is he going to hit where he needs to be? Because he needs to come out of here with total credibility with voters, the press, donors. He needs to be seen as a credible political figure. And they felt, at least on the Democratic side, that he did that.

And for Vice President Harris, this is the biggest speech of her career. As Bill Daley was telling me at Manny’s Deli in Chicago, we did a chat for CBS Sunday Morning , he said, “With all respect to the office of the vice presidency” — and this is a former White House chief of staff — he said that, “The country doesn’t pay attention to who’s vice president.” And so they know her, she’s historic, people respect her for being vice president of the country, but at the same time, if you asked one out of five Americans about her, maybe one out of five could give you a few facts. But she hasn’t been out front in the same way a president is. And that’s not surprising.

But how does she come across? I’m going to be really watching to see after the convention, how do people see Harris’s speech? What do they see from the vice president? Do they see someone with presidential timber, someone that gives them an opening to say, “yes, I want to cross the line,” because so much of politics is about turnout.

I know that sounds cliché, but in this specific sense, if you’re a Democratic organizer, you want the labor people to come out. You want traditional Democrats to come out. But you do wonder about that centrist voter, are they going to stay home or are they going to consider coming to the polls if they don’t like Trump? Are they going to maybe think about voting for Harris? And that can make a big difference in who wins this election. And a lot of that’s going to come down to energy and how people feel about these candidates, more than any specific policy position, because the policies will activate people in their own way, but there’s always that block of voters who really just wants to feel the candidate, feel the moment, and maybe make a last-minute decision.

And that’s why these conventions do matter. They don’t matter in terms of floor fights, as much as reporters would love to see an interesting convention, politically speaking, that’s not really the case anymore. But they do matter in terms of how the country finally starts tuning into these campaigns. And this is almost like the first episode of a mini-series on television that’s going to last a few weeks.

That thinking is what inspired the selection of Tim Walz as the VP pick. Another big speaker this week, who was passed over for that position, is Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. You grew up in Bucks County. You know him well. You’ve covered him for years. What did you make of his speech?

It was funny, I ran into Governor Shapiro in the halls of the convention, and I said, “You better be mentioning Bucks County.” And he was laughing with me because I grew up in Bucks County, a north of Philadelphia suburb. And he’s from Montgomery County, which is kind of a rival, what they call the collar counties, the surrounding counties of Philadelphia. And I said, “I know you’re a Montgo guy.” He said, “You know I’m all Montgo.” And he was just being funny, we were bantering about county competition. A very Pennsylvania discussion.

A lot of pride in the counties.

I think his security detail looked bored, but we were into the discussion. It’s fun as a reporter to see different things emerge over time, different people. My motto as a reporter has always been “assume nothing.” When I first started covering Donald Trump back in 2010, 2011, I never conceptualized that he would be the President of the United States, three-time Republican nominee, but I thought this guy could be a player who might want to run. So I stayed in touch with him, got to know him, covered him a lot, and interviewed him a ton. And it’s a good lesson always as a reporter to never assume that because someone’s in a low position politically or seen as a non-player, that they couldn’t be a player.

And Josh Shapiro, not to compare him to former President Trump in any political sense, they are total opposites. But I got to know Josh Shapiro when I was starting out in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as a freelance teenage reporter, college-age reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times , where I would write either for free or for 50 bucks an article. Mostly for free. But I just got bylines out of it. I covered concerts mostly, but I started my journalism career to cover music because the music companies would give me two free concert tickets, and I would write reviews and go see shows. To me, journalism seemed fun. You could interview musicians, go see concerts, and get paid, so it wasn’t bad. This was before blogs were a big thing, and I just thought I’d write for my local paper. Turned out to be a career. Here we are.

But what’s interesting is that Shapiro was this rising star in Montgomery County as a state representative. And just to give a real quick sense of what that means, it’s not much. State reps in Pennsylvania, there seem to be a million of them. It’s like you represent a few neighborhoods. It’s a small, small district for state reps. But he caught my eye because he was someone who was a former House chief of staff. People forget this about Shapiro. He worked on Capitol Hill as a chief of staff for a congressman named Joe Hoffer, who eventually ran statewide in Pennsylvania. Long story short, Josh Shapiro became this inside player in Harrisburg, the state capital, cut deals, was really seen as someone who was effective inside the legislature. And he eventually became deputy speaker, from a lowly state rep, he rapidly became deputy speaker of the State House, and I went to visit him in Montgomery County at his tiny office, talking politics, this was probably ’05 or ’06. So I had covered him a few times tangentially. But when I went to see him, I said, this guy is going to run for governor or Senate someday.

But what I’ve noticed about Shapiro over the years, and we stayed in a peripheral touch here and there, and I see him from time to time, is that Shapiro is one of the most methodical, careful politicians. He’s carefully climbed the ladder, went from state rep to deputy speaker, then ran for office in Montgomery County. Took his time, runs for attorney general, takes his time. Builds a record, runs for governor. He is in a rush, but never in a rush. He’s moving up, but he’s always taken his time. And that has enabled Shapiro, whether you love him in Pennsylvania or don’t like him, he has a real foundation of relationships in the state that have provided him with this bastion of goodwill, that have enabled him to become a very popular governor, and almost land on the national ticket.

But I thought his speech was short. It was focused and it was positive. He didn’t make himself the story. So he doesn’t come out of here with this huge bond. But I think he comes out of here to play another day politically, whether it’s in the cabinet, if Harris wins, or down the line to run for president. He hit his marks, just like Walz did, to reassure people that he’s not bitter about being off the ticket, he’s a team player, he can hit a positive message, and he carries on.

The Barack Obama speech affect, as some people call it. Has he always spoken like that?

I don’t see it that way. I’ve covered Shapiro for a while. He is someone who understands rhetorically how rhetoric works in Democratic politics, in American politics today. And here’s what I mean. You think about Nirvana. Hear me out on this. You know Nirvana in the grunge movement. Nirvana revolutionizes the rock sound with the way it starts really low, and then goes high, and then drops low, and then goes high, and then drops low, and then turns up again. And that effect changed the way people listen to rock music, because it comes out of the glam rock of the 80s, the really melodic, soaring riffs, and Nirvana deconstructs it. It makes it this simmer to explosion, simmer to explosion. And that was the rhythm of grunge. And it defined an era.

The era of rhetoric now in Democratic politics is oratorically a lot like a preacher cadence mixed with, yes, what former President Obama does, which is to start low, soar high, then come back low, and then finish with this flourish. And Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, was the case study of how this works when he spoke at the convention. Former President Obama does this, though he was a little bit more straightforward oratorically this time around at the convention.

But Shapiro is a lot like Pete Buttigieg. Pete Buttigieg has studied Obama, clearly studied how other great Democratic speakers are at this time. And there is a preacher’s cadence, an Obama-like cadence to how so many Democratic politicians speak today where they want to emotionally pull you in, reassure you in a moral sense that you’re having a conversation, and then frame things in this soaring way that ends with this explosion of urgency. So following a model that’s out there, yes, there’s no doubt about that. Is he copying Obama? I don’t see him as copying Obama. I see him as inspired by effective rhetoric today as so many politicians are. And Buttigieg is another one who has this reputation as a great speaker. He’s not compared directly to Obama, but there’s a lot of comparisons and similarities in how they try to hit these certain notes in a speech to keep the audience emotionally involved, and feeling like there’s a historic sensibility to the speech as well.

And I think in general, Barack Obama is never a bad person to get compared to in Democratic politics.

You don’t want to be compared to LBJ, he had a great speechwriter in Richard Goodwin. But LBJ could be a halty speaker. People used to do this all the time in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. Joe Biden suffered from this. People used to say Joe Biden sounded a lot like John Kennedy just because everyone wanted to sound like Kennedy. And people would ask questions and Democratic politicians would say, “To have lunch or to not have lunch. That is the question. And that’s Shakespeare.” They would copy Shakespeare, and they would copy Kennedy. “Ask not what this union can do for you, but what you can do for the union.” People would go oh, that’s how Kennedy spoke. Well, Kennedy inspired everybody.

I want to talk about this narrative that there’s still anger in the Democratic Party about the way Joe Biden was forced off the ticket. Do you see that as a legitimate story or is it more of a media creation?

I don’t think it’s a media story. I think it’s real. And I think it actually maybe deserves more coverage. Not in the sense of covering to exacerbate a wound, but you have a president of the United States who just a month ago was about to be nominated by his party and now is on vacation in California. And this is a president who has enormous ambition. I’ve covered President Biden for a while, and I had the opportunity to sit down with him in the White House residence a few weeks ago for CBS Sunday Morning . And it to me was so evident that he has this ambition. He looks at his presidency in these big terms.

That’s why I said to him, because I heard this from a couple Democratic senators, that in early 2021, when he gets into office, he points up at a picture of FDR on the wall in the Oval Office and says, “We’re going there.” What he meant by that, the senators told me, was he meant we’re going big. He didn’t want to just be a run-of-the-mill Democratic president who passes a few bills and then shuffles away into the history books. He wanted to try to make seismic change on domestic policy and have a major grip over foreign policy, with all of his experience going back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So he was playing for a big record, for a legacy from day one, not just for the sake of a legacy, but he had thought about the presidency, his friends had told me, since the 1970s, that it was a calling for him to think about having a big career, to have a career that was something that people remember, the Biden name as something of an accomplishment.

And so a lot of Democrats, for 50-plus years, have built a sense of political, I don’t know how else to put it, but love for President Biden. They love this guy. They appreciate him. I was talking to Jim Clyburn, the congressman from South Carolina yesterday. There’s this visceral bond they have with Biden. He was with Obama for eight years. He helped President Obama, the first Black president, as his vice president, showed respect, showed support each and every step of the way. Was in the Senate for years helping different Democratic constituencies. And it was people like Clyburn who put Biden over the top in 2020. And at that famous meeting at the USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina, Clyburn says to Biden, “I’ll give you my endorsement, but you got to promise me there’s going to be a Black woman on the Supreme Court. I want to see these changes when it comes to civil rights policy and spending policy.” And Biden reassures, “I’m with you. I will do it.” Clyburn endorses Biden, Biden becomes the nominee, Biden becomes president.

So he has these roots with them, with the Democratic Party. When you pull something out in life that has such deep roots, there’s going to be some pain. What’s intriguing is that the Democrats so far at this convention have been pretty good at papering over any pain. But it’s true, when I talk to the old school Democrats, there is pain, and there’s a little concern that no one wants to talk about it publicly, most Democrats, but there is a concern that if somehow Vice President Harris loses this election, they believe she’s going to win, but if she loses, it’s going to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking in November about what exactly happened in the summer of 2024, and was it the right move? But for now, they almost feel forced to, and a lot of them want to be, 90%, compelled to just buy in. Biden made the decision. He may not have loved it, but he made the decision. Now everybody’s got to buy in, and it’s just a sprint between now and November.

You scored the first sit-down interview with Joe Biden after he dropped out of the race. Did you notice, off-camera, any anger, or emotion, or lingering resentment about the way that he was treated?

It’s a great question. Not to tout my own work, but I would encourage people to go to YouTube and search “ CBS Sunday Morning Biden interview Costa” and find it, because I give you a behind-the-scenes sense of why I approached it a certain way. So I go into the residence. I had never been to the residence. Who gets a chance to go to the residence? You don’t. It’s just very random and rare. So it’s the second floor of the White House. You go up, the first room you see is the Treaty Room, and that’s the president’s private office. And so we’re setting up our cameras, the president’s home is a foot away, you’re inside the president’s home, and you go into his private office.

This isn’t like the Oval Office, which I’ve been in as a reporter several times. The Oval Office has almost a corporate CEO feel. It’s a beautiful office, obviously, but it’s it’s the place of business. The Treaty Room, which I’d never been to, on the second floor is a private office. And so I’m walking around as we’re setting up, and I see all these family pictures on the wall. I see pictures of Biden’s parents, black-and-white big photos framed. They remind me of the photos that were in my grandparents’ house of their parents, and just this reverence for their parents, reverence for the past, for the family in these black-and-white photos. And I see these pictures of Beau Biden, the late Beau Biden, Hunter, Ashley, Jill. I see these trinkets from Delaware, some footballs that are signed by different teams that have come through.

And you get this sense when you’re in the Treaty Room of the White House that you’re in Biden’s actual office. It reminds me of the office my dad has at home, or some people have at home, where their whole life in a personal way is here. And this is not an office he shows people. It’s an office where he actually works in. He goes home at night and he reads here. This is a famous office where Nixon used to be with Kissinger in private moments during Watergate. It’s a place where a lot of treaties and diplomatic stuff have been haggled over for over a century.

And so I’m looking at all of this stuff. And as the president comes in the room, he’s in a good mood, he’s in good spirits and sits down, and I see just the family is everywhere. And so I say to myself, no one’s asked about the family. And I talked to a Biden confidant before the interview, and I said, what’s on his mind? And the Biden confidant said he’s saying to the people behind the scenes that he’s thinking about Beau. And what would his late son want him to do? And he’s so close to Hunter now, and of course, to Jill. But Beau Biden told him when he was near death in 2015 that he wanted his dad to carry on. And Biden wrote a whole book about that final year of Beau’s life. He called it Promise Me, Dad . And that’s what Beau said because he knew his father has this tendency to, as he did in 1972 for understandable reasons, sometimes move to a dark place when you’re dealing with tragedy and tough events. And I think Beau always pushed his father to stay in the arena, to stay in the fight.

And so I asked him about Rehoboth Beach, and I wanted to get Biden to say something as he sees it, because too often I think in journalism, I make this mistake all the time, if you come up with a question that’s like four sentences long, then you’re almost constraining the answer to a small space. And I thought for history, I was going to open it up and see what he says. And he mentions Nancy Pelosi, which was notable. And then I said to him, what about the family? Because I was struck when I was watching his address to the Oval Office, I saw these wire pictures come through afterward. And Hunter Biden puts his hand to his father’s face. And Biden’s eyes and face are just so emotional. You can just see it in the photos from the photographers. And the family was crying. This stuff’s real, you read about presidencies when they end or toward the end. These are human beings.

So I asked about the family, and then I asked him about Beau, and his head dipped, and when you’re sitting there as a reporter, you say to yourself, this interview could collapse, because this could get very emotional. But I wanted to get some emotional truth about his decision beyond just the politics, politics, politics, politics. I sense that this was a decision fueled by political urgency and nerve-wracking chatter among his Democratic friends. But it was also personal where he had to deal with his own moment, personally and politically, and what this all meant for him and his life.

Speaking of Trump, you spoke with him this week. What was that like?

I called former President Trump a couple of hours before President Obama took the stage on Tuesday. It was interesting because he was on the road in Michigan. And he was talking to sheriffs, talking to union members. And I’ve as I told you, I’ve known Trump since 2010, 2011 when I first interviewed him at CPAC and stayed in touch, I went up to see him at Trump Tower. He has this conversational cadence himself. I always think the best way to talk to Trump is on the phone, because when you interview Trump in person, the persona of Trump is always front and center, the hands clasped between the knees, the lean forward, the head jutted, the hair, the tie, the posture, it’s a certain kind of thing you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a political and public figure who has been around since the 1970s, in a sense, being Donald Trump.

But when you catch him on the phone, and when I was at The Washington Post and at CBS too, some of the best conversations I’ve ever had with Trump, the most revealing of the state of mind, I’ve been on the phone, so I just thought I’d call him because so much of Trump, you think about Obama, and that that famous moment at the White House Correspondents Dinner where Obama makes fun of Trump, who’s then a private citizen, Trump just stares up at the stage, and Roger Stone and others close to Trump have always pointed to that moment as one where the ridicule really got under Trump’s skin. He just found Obama to be far too flippant about him, and about other people, and that may not be the direct reason he ran in 2015, when he announced on the escalator after that. But it was still part of the whole world of his decision-making.

Ultimately, he didn’t like President Obama, and he made false claims about President Obama in terms of questioning his love of country, his credentials, with the birther issue. And that really has always angered the Obama people, that this guy has really gone somewhere on Obama that they find just so out of line. It’s not just a political difference. They think it’s an egregious, really personal, and wrong, and false — rightly — this accusation.

But anyway, I spoke to Trump and I said, “What do you think about Obama speaking?” And he said, “I don’t think about it. That’s life, he’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to just go up there. He’s going to say what he’s going to say. That’s life. You know, Bob, that’s life.” And some people may chuckle that, oh, Trump’s clearly paying attention. Of course, he’s going to watch what Obama has to say. But Trump is playing down the idea that he’s consumed with Obama, because I think he’s learned, watching the press coverage of him, that if he reacts in an emotional way or in an immediate knee-jerk way, Obama will have been seen as effective in getting to Trump. And he did respond to it the day after on Wednesday on the trail.

But talking to Trump, he believes that if he keeps going in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the border like he is on Friday in Arizona, that he can win this election. And when you talk to Trump people and to Trump himself, there’s a sensibility that in August of 2016, he was on the ropes against Clinton and people thought that Trump would never win. But he was able to focus in September and October and really laced her with personal attacks, political attacks, focused messages in certain states, and was able to, as we all know, win the Electoral College, and win the election.

There’s a belief in the Trump orbit that this is a tough summer, an assassination attempt, the Democrats move away from Biden and toward Harris, the Democrats seem to be having a good convention, even in the eyes of some Republicans. But there’s still a sense that there’s time left. And that’s what Tim Walz was saying. Sleep when you’re dead because the Democrats have been burned before getting a little too confident that Trump is somehow diminished.

You covered the chaotic end to the Trump administration in your book with Bob Woodward, Peril , which was a brilliant read. Having had such a close look at everything that happened there, did it surprise you when Trump so easily came back from what many people thought was political death, took over the Republican Party, and now is set to potentially return to the White House?

He did it, in a way, because Trump saw in the Republican Party a vessel that did not have a computing power center. I remember I called Trump when he was president in 2017, and the health care bill he was trying to pass, a conservative bill, had collapsed. He complained to me that the Republican Party was like 100 parties, and this party can’t get its act together, they’re always fighting with each other. But he also recognized that with all the different camps in the GOP, there was a weakness in the party that enabled him to be the central figure. Ronald Reagan and the Bush family, with these poles of ideology in politics that have held the party together since 1980, had not held on to their position. And that created this opening for him to come in and to just state that he was now going to be the leader.

And of course, to this day, there is skepticism among some traditional Republicans and conservative media figures, to a point, about Trump. But he saw a weakness in the party, especially post-Bush, George W. Bush, to come in and say to the base, “I can be your champion now.” And after January 6th, you had resignations of Trump people, but no one was willing, with huge stature, to come in and say “never again.” And to do it in a way that wasn’t moral, but to do it in a way that was political. It’s one thing to take a moral stand against Trump and to resign in the wake of January 6th and say, “I cannot accept his conduct, I find him repugnant as a political figure and in a moral sense.” And that will get you some points and some support. It will make Democrats perhaps sympathetic to your decision. And you might even be welcome to speak at a Democratic convention because you’re that kind of Republican for whom Trump went a bridge too far on morally.

The harder question for Republicans is who can compete with Trump? We get on a moral level, but on a political level, who can build a coalition? And the challenge so many Republicans have, and I think why Trump has survived, and why he is a historic figure; being on three national tickets as a nominee is no joke. That’s something you never really see going back. The last person to be on multiple tickets like that, it’s Nixon. Nixon was on five: three as president, two as vice president.

And you see in Trump someone who took the Republican playbook and upended it, but kept the vote. He went away from the Republican policy on trade. He went away from the Republican policy on long-term federal spending, not taking the Paul Ryan position on making adjustments to Medicare and Social Security. And these were things that you used to, in the Republican Party fifteen years ago, ten years ago, if you took a stand that was stridently against The Wall Street Journal editorial page, you had a real political risk. Trump just barreled through it and built this populist coalition that pulled in some Democrats and independents — especially on the issue of immigration — and was able to sustain it.

And he has a belief that most people do not have the same moral outrage that some people in the press, some people the Democratic Party, and some Republicans have about his conduct. In fact, he believes he is accepted by a large portion of the country that got to know him through NBC’s The Apprentice , sees him as a celebrity figure, and they baked in his conduct and personality into their perception of him. And he doesn’t pay a political price because he’s never sold himself as someone who’s beyond reproach.