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Inside Politics

Trump Names Sean Duffy As Interim NASA Chief; Looking Back At 2024 In New Book On Historic Race; Trump's Return To White House Chronicled In New Book On 2024; New Book Goes Behind-The-Scenes Of Trump-Biden Debate; New Book Reveals Inside Of Harris Campaign In Final Sprint. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired July 10, 2025 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[12:30:42]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Tapping our political radar, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is now adding space to his territory as President Trump named him interim NASA administrator. President Trump hasn't nominated a permanent space chief since he withdrew his first pick, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman, in part because of Isaacman's close ties to Elon Musk. Duffy's acceptance post? "Time to take over space. Let's launch."

And outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis says his party will have serious challenges keeping his North Carolina seat red. He spoke exclusively with Jake Tapper. And while RNC Chair Michael Whatley said the race is fellow Carolina native Laura Trump's to lose, listen closely to Tillis' calculation.

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SEN. THOM TILLIS (R), NORTH CAROLINA: They're all, I mean, they've all got to decide. You know, our state is very difficult for Republicans to win.

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BASH: The president's daughter-in-law told Fox News Radio last week she is considering a run.

And is a Hollywood endorsement still worth it in politics? Actress Sarah Jessica Parker says she doesn't think Americans or history cares much what people like her say.

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SARAH JESSICA PARKER, ACTRESS: Sometimes I'll say when people are like, you've got to speak up on social media. I was like, FDR was elected without social media. Like many things happen.

(END VIDEOCLIP) BASH: Parker told Nicolle Wallace that her connections with female fans made her rethink that last year. And just like that, she did back the Harris-Walz ticket. But now we are left to wonder, will she endorse again?

Up next, we're going to go inside the 2024 presidential campaign. How Joe Biden's aides almost sat him down to rethink re-election, but never did. The Harris campaign panic after a gaffe on The View.

And President Trump's post-election reflections over fried shrimp and tartar sauce. It's all in a new book out now, and the authors will be here after the break.

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[12:37:21]

JOE BIDEN, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thank you, chair, that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID -- excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with -- look, if we finally beat Medicare.

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BASH: That moment, remember it well, effectively helped end the 2024 presidential race and really changed American politics. But it was just one flashpoint in a historic whirlwind campaign. The story of how Donald Trump went from political pariah to the 47th president of the United States is all chronicled in a new book, "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America." It's written by Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal, Tyler Pager of The New York Times and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post.

I have Josh and Tyler here to discuss it. Congratulations. I have it here. Pre-ordered it. It was excited when it came on pub day.

Josh, I'm going to start with you, and on the debate. We -- that's where the book starts. Actually, the book starts well -- well before that in 2022 and on President Trump. That is the time, of course, he announced in early of November 2022. And during that announcement -- we're looking at some video of it now, there were empty seats. It was a lackluster crowd. I don't think that they could really get anybody there.

Did the campaign see themselves as an underdog real time or are they maybe rewriting history a little bit now? Luckily, you're the one writing the real history. So what did you hear from people about how they felt at that time?

JOSH DAWSEY, CO-AUTHOR, "2024": Well, at the time, it was not viewed as a particularly great moment for the candidate. Now with the president, you know, he was going to do an interview that night with Sean Hannity. They ended up not happening. As we reported in the book, they couldn't get any senators to come. They couldn't get many members of Congress to come.

They couldn't even get some of the MAGA celebrities that they sort of wanted there, we say in the book. It's pretty grim. And we talked to Steve Bannon, who says he's watching that night as all the TV networks cut away. You know, no one's even taking this fully live. And he goes, this is going to be uphill battle.

And if you remember at the time, Dana, there was a lot of conservative enthusiasm for Ron DeSantis. The New York Post famously did the future cover. You saw a lot of activists going down to Florida to meet with him. You saw a lot of folks who were sort of saying it was time to move on.

[12:40:06]

You know, one of the things we chronicle in the book is sort of in that period, how kind of dark things were for President Trump at Mar- a-Lago. You know, his home had been raided. He was under multiple investigations. All of his aides were being subpoenaed, being asked to testify against him. FBI was showing up at some people's doors.

I mean, this was not a particularly bright or happy time. And sort of the book chronicles how through a number of shrewd decisions, a little bit of luck, and through sort of a calculus that was hard to see that night when he announced how he came back.

BASH: Yes, it certainly was hard to see then. You're absolutely right. I remember being on the air in and around that announcement in 2022. And the vibes we were getting was exactly that. Never mind the DeSantis factor, which turned out not to be.

Tyler, let's turn to President Biden. It was clear for a long time that the polls did not look good for him. You write about how senior aides planned in the fall of 2023 to have one last talk with him about whether or not he should really run. Here's what you say.

You say, "The aides planned to encourage Biden to consider how much of his time those problems would take up and the toll they would take on him personally. They would ask him to reflect on his responsibilities as president, candidate and father. But the aides never found the chance."

So October 7th happened. I did not know this. This is such an interesting nugget of reporting.

TYLER PAGER, CO-AUTHOR, "2024": Yes, I mean, it's a remarkable what if, right? There's these conversations at the senior most level of the White House in the fall of 2023 about whether or not, you know, they should really have a face to face, heart to heart conversation with the president. They weren't going to explicitly tell him do not run. But the subtext was going to be clear, right?

Dana, as you mentioned, the polls for a long period of time kept showing the majority of Democrats did not want Joe Biden to run again for re-election. Joe Biden wanted to run again for re-election. He felt vindicated by the midterms. But there were a whole host of problems on the horizon, both politically and personally.

His son Hunter Biden was going through significant legal challenges. There was global crises he's going on. And they just weren't sure that the president was up for mounting an aggressive campaign. I think one of the important things to note is that advisers were not worried about his ability to do the job of president.

Some might have been. But these advisers that were having these conversations were more concerned about his ability to run for president, which they saw as distinctly different than doing the job.

BASH: Such an important distinction which, you know, I think some people looked at it as a distinction without a difference. But, you know, running a campaign, particularly a presidential campaign, and having that part of your brain and your energy and running the country could be two different things.

And, Josh, back on the Trump campaign, his advisers understood very early that a key piece of this race is something that Democrats overlooked, which is Donald Trump's loss in 2020 wasn't just because he slept with women, but his big problem was with men. Tell us about that, because this has fascinated me from then until today.

DAWSEY: So we obtained a memo for the book where in early 2024, Trump's advisers, James Blair, his political director and sort of his top data guy charted out what was a path to winning. How could Trump win? And they believed in the memos that we saw that the key was not to win over, you know, suburban women or not to win over folks who were against the president or turned on the president over the years. But it really was to run up a score with men.

And what they saw when they analyzed the data from 2016 to 2020 was that a really important slippage, a bigger slippage was with men. And the goal was to craft a campaign that would bring men to vote for him, that would bring these folks home. You saw that him taping all of the podcasts down the stretch with all of the various hosts, the UFC fights, the football games, airing the ads about, you know, Kamala Harris's comments about trans issues during football games.

It was all about driving up a score with men. It was an effective strategy. I mean, the book sort of charts out on a few fronts, whether it's running for men, whether his position on abortion that they thought found out a way to make it less of a political albatross, how to get him to take things for early voting, even though he had said he was against early voting, anything other than voting in person with his false claims on the election.

[12:45:01]

I mean, he made a series of pretty shrewd choices throughout 2024. A lot of them behind the scenes, but together sort of manifested themselves as a big reason for the victory.

BASH: Yes. Well, the manosphere existed before, but boy, did they take advantage and help to mushroom that notion of reaching out to men in the spaces where men are. I want you guys to stick around, if you don't mind, because we have a lot more to talk to, a lot of really interesting nuggets in this book. We started talking about the debate. We're going to talk more about it. And a new memo that these authors found out about and obtained that helped explain how the CNN debate in June of 2024 came about.

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[12:50:11]

BASH: Welcome back. Josh Dawsey and Tyler Pager are still with me talking about their new book, "2024," written with Isaac Arnsdorf.

Tyler, starting with you now, you all obtained a memo, which was written by senior campaign officials, to President Biden saying, you should debate early. And the result of that memo meant that CNN had that debate, June 27th, 2024. And I remember Jake and I were sitting there, obviously, throughout. We knew that this was not good for President Biden.

When he came down and talked to us after the debate, he -- unless he was just completely, you know, trying to seem unfazed, it really felt like he was unfazed by the way that that went. But what you found out is -- and this is an excerpt from your book, this is during the debate, "For a moment, Biden's aides reassured themselves. He usually got off to a rough start. But hope quickly evaporated. Back in the hold room, Klain," meaning Ron Klain, his longtime aide and adviser who helped with debate prep, "stood up and announced, we're f-ed."

Tyler?

PAGER: Yes. I mean, the memo, I think, is a really interesting historical document because of what unfolded in that debate changed the course of the presidential election and arguably American history with the return of Donald Trump. And what the debate -- what that memo shows is that Biden's closest advisers knew that the president was not winning re-election at that moment, that he needed to do something to shake up the race.

They had long held the belief that once it was a two-man race, Biden versus Trump, voters would come home to Biden and that he would be able to resurrect the coalition that elected him in 2020. But that memo shows they needed to do something early to really get that rolling, and so they pitched him on moving this debate, abandoning the Commission on Presidential Debates that had long been the organizing body for these nonpartisan debates.

But, you know, those debates didn't start until September, and they felt that was too late. So they write him this six-page memo outlining what this whole preparation plan is going to be.

Dana, one of the interesting things about that memo that I don't think has gotten a lot of attention is at the end of it, it says, here's this plan for you to make sure you're prepared. And part of it includes doing town halls, some of them -- one of them televised so he can practice before the debate. That town hall never happened. In part, I was told by sources for the book that it's because some networks wouldn't agree to have the town hall because Biden's ratings weren't that good, and so it wasn't worth the investment.

BASH: Well, I'm sure we would have had the town hall. That's really --

PAGER: Not sure that CNN was offered that opportunity --

BASH: Yes, no, I --

PAGER: -- but you guys got the debate.

BASH: -- think you're right. I think you're right. Yes, we did OK there. So interesting.

Josh, when it comes to the Trump war room, how they were reacting, everybody was shocked at how Biden performed. By the way, just even looking at that clip again that we played a couple of minutes ago, you know, being in the room, you kind of could see it, but being a viewer up close seeing Donald Trump's face, you could see that he was like, oh, my gosh, what I've been saying about Joe Biden seems to be happening in real time.

What was the reporting that you have brought into this book about what was happening in the Trump war room?

DAWSEY: So we have a scene in the book where Trump senior advisers, all of his surrogates, are sitting in this volleyball arena at Georgia Tech, and they're watching the debate up on the screen. And because it starts so poorly for Biden, they believe that the noise is not working properly on the TV. They're struggling to hear him.

And Daniel Alvarez, his comms director for the campaign, shouts out, can someone turn the volume up? It's not on. It's not on. And then they realized, oh, the volume was on. And that was just how Biden sounded in that moment.

And what was so interesting to us is that Trump had sort of said for so long that Biden was out of it. And they cut up clips and the, you know, right-wing accounts that sort of showed all of these things of him. But the campaign actually was sort of coming out and saying, oh, he might have an actual good debate. He might be prepared.

BASH: Right.

DAWSEY: He might be ready. We need to sort of talk like that. And they realized in that moment how bad he was actually doing, how badly he was actually doing. And they sort of came up with new talking points, right? They brought printers in the room and sort of then had to go back to that.

And the interesting part was Daniel Alvarez and others standing in that room told the surrogates. So those included Marco Rubio, JD Vance, all sorts of folks who were going out. You know, you need to make sure that whatever you say, we say Biden is still their nominee. We've got to keep Biden in the race. We've got to keep Biden in the race, right?

And so that that really changed our calculus in that moment watching the debate.

[12:55:11]

BASH: Gosh, such great reporting. Really terrific color.

Tyler, very quickly, just because we're almost out of time. The biggest challenge after Biden did drop out for Kamala Harris was the obvious that she had two months to campaign for a race, the highest office in the land that usually takes years to prepare for.

PAGER: Yes, I mean, this is something that was clearly the biggest obstacle for Kamala Harris. Joe Biden was not popular, as evidenced by the polls before the debate and even after the debate. And Kamala Harris needed to figure out how to run a race and run a campaign that was about her. And she really struggled to do that and ultimately wasn't able to really do so. And that contributed to her loss in November.

BASH: Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, this is the book. Go get it. So many more really great anecdotes in this. Thanks for being here.

And thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts right now.

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