Muse

One day I'll have grandkids or great-grandkids, and I'm sure even then the Trump presidency will be the subject of great curiosity. And the memory I'll share with them is how Trump telegraphed to everyone that his departure from the White House was going to be ugly, and that's exactly the way it turned out to be.

This thing we've been waiting for since the presidential election, it happened.

Right. The transfer of power complete.

I'm Scott Bland. This is Nerdcast.

Just so many memories.

Here at Politico, we've had reporters watch President Donald Trump up close, in the room, at his rallies, on Air Force One.

Crazy.

Who the hell was something?

I didn't see that coming.

For the last four years. A little longer, actually, if you count the campaign. And listeners, they have got stories to tell.

I've actually never told this story before.

For the past two years, I haven't been able to get this moment out of my head.

This is like the holy shit moment. They've got shit to get off their chests. This is where, oh, I think our story just took on a whole new lease on life. Can't believe this is happening. Well, believe it.

None of us could go to bed that night.

Oh my gosh, all these people need therapy.

President Trump held a rally in which he argued that windmills cause cancer. It was stunning.

Off the record, no comment.

A moment in history I will never forget.

So buckle your seatbelts, keep your hands and arms inside the carpet, as they say on Aladdin, and let the skeletons out of your closets.

Yes, the president made those comments. Please respond.

Undermining of norms. What's my name? Okay.

So here we go.

The fact that our own colleagues had to pick up bulletproof vests to cover the inauguration.

Yeah.

It's just like a crazy sign of the times that I didn't predict a month ago. I really didn't.

January 2021 has been just absolutely crazy. And it's probably given most of us our most searing, or what will be our most searing memories of the Trump administration. On January 6th, there were riots at the Capitol.

I did not think there was going to be rioters and an insurrection in our U.S. Capitol. Like, I just couldn't predict it. And so now I'm sort of open to the possibility of anything.

On January 13th, the next Wednesday, Donald Trump was impeached for a second time. And then on January 20th, the Wednesday after that, Joe Biden became president.

But I guess there's a sense of relief that the transition of power happened without that.

Tara Palmieri is one of our four new playbook authors. Where do you wish you were a fly on the wall right now? Like, what do you imagine you'd see? What are you most excited about staking out in your role as a playbook author?

Okay. So if I was a fly on the wall, obviously, I want to be in the Oval Office, right? I want to see everything. I want to see what Trump left behind. I want to see what Trump took. I want to read the note he left Biden. I want to know what Biden's first move is. Does he like he sits down in the chair and does he kick his feet up and put them on the resolute desk? Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, what is that like? You know, it's that place he's obviously familiar with. There's just so many things to look out for. I mean, just in D.C., like when we finally get vaccinated, does the city come back to life? You know, how do the Biden people what part of town do they take over? What's their what's their stamp going to be on on on D.C. as a city? Where do they hang out?

I mean, that's going to be like kind of something you probe with the new kind of relaunch playbook. And what it's you and Ryan Lizza, Rachel Bade, Eugene Daniels. And the tagline is the unofficial guide to official Washington. Yeah, this sounds like exactly what you're talking about. It's like it's not just not just what's happening, but what's like motivating the people who are making things happen.

Totally. Yeah, I think we're going to be keeping an eye on all of that. And like the city changes with every administration. You know, I know Biden isn't necessarily the most vibrant of politicians. He's an older guy. But, you know, he's bringing on a whole new team. Some of them are old. Some of them are coming from Obama world. How much influence is Obama world going to have on Biden's team? You know, are there going to be rivalries between them? Where are the where the cleavage is going to be within the own within the office? Like, you know, there's gonna be power struggles and it's just gonna be it's gonna be you know, it's gonna be like, I don't know. I don't know what it's gonna be like.

I'm very curious how that sort of stuff comes to light. Right. Because like the Trump administration, among other things was just notorious for how leaky it was, I think, because there was there was so much power struggle, there was there was backbiting, there were these differing power centers. Yeah. How do you anticipate the Biden administration is going to be going to be different or similar?

I think in the beginning of any administration, even the Trump administration, they're just a little bit more disciplined in terms of talking to the press, or they're wary of the press, they don't know reporters yet. But, you know, they're kind of feeling us all out. A lot of the news teams have new White House correspondents covering them, you know.

they're probably getting a lot of flattering press right now, but that's going to change. So we call them source sweeteners. So all of that is going to change. And also the dynamics in the White House are going to change. It's not going to be just like this exciting. We've taken over the Oval Office. They're going to see the difficulties of trying to move their agenda forward. There's going to be rivalries within the office. There are going to be people who disagree. And with all of that, with the human dynamic, the drama, it's often bound to leak out. Will it be as easy as covering the Trump administration in which you could just call anyone and find out where they

stand and where the issues are? It turns out some people could just kind of wander around in the

West Wing. Yeah. Do I think security is going to be the same? I don't know. I mean, listen, apparently Sean Spicer has a hard pass. Are they going to take that away? These are all things we're going to have to be paying attention to. I think it's going to be different, but I don't think it's going to be the same as the Obama administration because I think Trump did maybe make some parts of being president a bit more unconventional and lax. And I'm sure in some ways Biden will like parts of that as well. Tara, as you look ahead to the Biden administration,

what's a memory from the last few years before it that's going to stay with you?

I once got into his golf club, like went with a guest and got swarmed by all of his staff when I tried to walk up to him. Wait, what? Gate crashing is my specialty. Reporters all over

our newsroom are reflecting on things that will stay with them forever. Take our chief economic

correspondent, Ben White. If I can think of any story, and I've written, you know, dozens and

dozens about Trump and his policies and his actions. His most memorable moment is from an Iowa rally in 2015, where he saw then future President Trump speak for the first time.

So he's a pathological... Seeing the zeal for him and his ability to capture the crowd with what seemed to me like completely incoherent ramblings and saying these terrible things about Ben Carson and terrible things about immigrants and anchor babies and all the rest of it. And I thought, man, this guy could be both dangerous and very, very effective as a politician. So that, to me, really sticks out. I'll never forget that rally in Iowa in November of 2015.

You can go back to the other guys later, but let's straighten it out, okay? We'll go back to

the guys with the nice... Election night 2016 is obviously an iconic moment of the Trump presidency, especially so for Politico founding editor John Harris.

I think my most lasting memory is from the beginning.

Biden presidential transition reporter Megan Casella.

Election night 2016.

And cannabis reporter Natalie Fertig.

Every time I think of the Trump presidency, I think of that night when it started.

I feel like I know politics pretty well, and I've long since learned about the hazards of prediction. But I did feel that the Hillary Clinton's victory was virtually inevitable.

Throughout the night, editors at first were asking, like, you have versions prepared for both outcomes,

right? Watching all of the people who showed up completely, completely sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Not a doubt in their minds. The event was like a party. You know, they had beer. You've got that huge glass ceiling. It was intentionally chosen to be in history books.

And so I remember that first night when the dominoes started to fall.

And a couple hours in, it shifted to, you know, make sure you have your Trump stuff ready. And before too long, it was sort of a much more emphatic, I need to see your Trump stuff. Send me your Trump stuff now. I need to start looking at it.

And I remember that sense of disbelief.

I guess everyone always talks about being in the room with the winner, but being in the room with the loser is almost more poignant. It's more interesting. It's kind of more jarring.

It just felt like despite our best planning, we always knew this was a possibility, but we were thrown back on our heels. And that felt like it happened a lot under Trump over the next four years. We got used to it and we got better at it, but it definitely happened over and over again.

Donald Trump's four years have sometimes been described as a circus.

What will I miss about Donald Trump? The whole thing. The whole circus. Now, don't think that I'm a bad person for admitting this.

And Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Matt Worker might actually kind of miss the tweets.

You know, the old Chinese curse about, may you live in interesting times? Well, we got it. Yeah, that's right. And in some ways, in some upside down world way, it's been awesome and exhausting. And I hate to admit it, but I will probably miss it.

And on the other hand, White House reporter Meredith McGraw...

I'm not going to miss the tweets. Plain and simple. I can't even calculate how many times I've had to step out of a dinner or veer off the side of the road to respond to a tweet.

Lawmakers... Please?

also hated having to talk to reporters about Trump's tweets, as editor Darius Dixon remembers.

Listen... I'm not going to miss the tweets. All right. Leave me hi-ipped. No. Come on. Even though,

And I was chasing Congressman Mike Simpson from Idaho.

let me just... Hey. How a good guy. Thank you. In the years. You have not worked out...

Conservative Republican, but also very, very clear in his in his thinking.

You have to have some tips. VUI direkt. Near the design. Over the last bit is... 're always tried to win your hands in overnight business.

If he knew the answer, he'd probably tell you.

I have to pee and dig because I see... I've met a lot of yachts.

If he didn't know it, he'd tell you that too.

Tom Robert on star field...

Whenever I caught him, he would talk.

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He didn't like the president's tweeting.

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He said he found it disturbing.

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That was his word.

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But he said, at some point, there's going to be a moment, a moment of crisis like 9-11. And the president's going to have to be able to get the American people and unify the American people around an issue. And so I always thought about that. And what moment would that be? What crisis would that be? Would it be a war? Would it be COVID? And then the attack on the Capitol happened. Right. And how do you get the country to unify around something like that? You know, addressing something like that?

Personally, I remember May 9th, 2017, the day James Comey got fired. And I remember it was the end of a long day. And I just remember, it was a bit after 5 o'clock, I was thinking about going home. And I just remember seeing one of our reporters kind of hustling into this central spot in our newsroom where a lot of the editors sit. And I remember overhearing very softly, you know, a source just told me that Jim Comey got fired. That's what I heard. And I remember thinking at that moment, it's like, oh my God. And then, of course, a minute later, you know, we had the story out. Everyone had the story out. And it was what everyone in news and people who read news was talking about. And so much of the next one to three years stemmed from that moment. Another big thing happening around that time, Republicans were trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump ran on it. Republicans have been talking about it for, what, seven, eight years at that point. And there was a lot of noise about it in 2017.

And it was one night in February of 2017.

Paul Demko was covering health care in 2017. And he was in a bar getting a drink. Waiting on a friend that I was meeting for a drink. When he got a call from an unknown number.

And I answer it and have kind of a strange conversation with this person who I'm basically kind of trying to blow off because I want to get a drink and not worry about work. But eventually this person basically blurts out that they have a document. Hey, I've got a document you should see. A copy of the Republican-controlled House's Obamacare repeal plan.

And his friend shows up and they bike across D.C. to a street corner.

And sure enough, this person proceeds to hand over a 100-page draft bill that is the current Republican proposal to repeal Obamacare. And I became the first person to see that draft or at least a report on it. It was another two weeks and several different iterations later before Obamacare replacement plan was released publicly. And if you'll recall, that bill, or a version of that bill, eventually did pass the House but died in the Senate. And Obamacare remains the law of the land.

Alice Olsteen was in the room the night Senate Republicans tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The change in the politics of the Affordable Care Act and health care in general were really, you know, on display and on the horizon that night when McCain did his famous thumbs down. You know, being there that night and seeing the chaos and seeing Republicans' plans fall apart really was a clear window into how we got to where we are today.

Sometimes our most vivid memories are not what we covered or a particular event, but just how the world around us changed. Like walking into a party.

And I went to a party in Baltimore where I'm from, got there, greeted everybody. And I realized after about five minutes that everyone at this party was talking about Betsy DeVos.

DeVos had just gone through her confirmation hearings, talked about guns in schools, rural schools, protecting themselves against bears. Bears. I'd forgotten about that one. She'd been given the SNL treatment. The whole works.

Everyone at this party was talking about it. And I'm almost positive not a lot of those people could have probably named the last education secretary or any education secretary for that matter. It was a small thing, but I think it portended. how much so many of our conversations, so much of our thinking for so many people that may not have been into politics before became about Donald Trump and what he was doing every day as one of the most unconventional presidents of the United States that we've ever had.

Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels remembers a darker day in American politics.

The moment I keep coming back to is when white supremacists marched on Charlottesville. I remember being scared. I remember being shocked but not surprised. Honestly, I think it sums up how we got to where we are right now in this country really well, and I'll tell you why. First, it felt like that was a time when a lot of Americans kind of woke up and said, oh crap, racism, anti-Semitism are still very much around. The second reason it comes to mind is President Trump's comments that there were very fine people on both sides.

Very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group, excuse me.

It was a reminder that President Trump has a really hard time and always has of saying anything bad about someone who might like him. It's key to understanding who he is as a person, and I think it's also key to why he no longer is President of the United States.

Our resident Aussie and global reporter Ryan Heath has covered Trump in Europe, in New Hampshire, all over. And he covered how the Davos crowd reacted to Trump in 2018.

We're talking here about the richest, most powerful, private jet-owning people on the planet. And privately, the CEOs and ministers, they would tell me that Trump was a buffoon. But when it came to it... On behalf of the business leaders here in the room... They just wanted to be part of the spectacle. They just completely parted like the Red Sea for Donald Trump when he finally arrived. And I realised then that they would not stand up to him in any meaningful way. Turns out they just wanted to watch like they were little kids at the circus. And all it took was for Trump to read off a teleprompter and not go after their taxes, and they were just dumbstruck.

Let me particularly congratulate you for the historic tax reform.

And so it was clear to me at that moment that Trump was going to push boundaries for every day of his presidency. And for the politicians, most of them, they were just afraid of him. I remember going up to the Irish foreign minister after Trump gave that speech and just asked him what he thought of it. And he was just afraid to even answer the question. He ran away from him. And that moment just told me everything about how much we needed to pay very close attention to the norms that would

be shredded throughout his whole presidency. Anthony Andragna is an energy reporter whose favorite kind of work is accountability reporting.

I remember one morning getting an embargoed look at documents that the House Oversight Committee was going to release.

But it got weird under Trump.

It became clear that Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, bedeviled by seemingly a million scandals, had sought to purchase a used mattress from the Trump Hotel. And I thought, this is not what I expected this job would look like.

Megan Casella remembers reporting trips, especially one to Illinois to report on trade policy that had hurt farmers, tariffs and retaliatory tariffs that made machinery expensive while lowering the value of crops.

And so I spent a few days talking to dozens of farmers who were all really hurting and who had the numbers to prove it, could see just how much their bottom lines had been hit by President Trump's tariffs. But they all said that they were going to stick with him because they believed in him. They trusted him. They had all sorts of reasons. And it really made me recognize the hold that Trump had on so much of the country, even when people were really hurt directly by his policies. Democrats had hoped to pick up that rural Illinois district, but the Republican candidate won it really easily. Two years later, the tariffs are still there, causing pain. And it's still a red district.

Editor Steve Shepard is one of my partners in crime in the office on the politics team. And he remembers the 2018 midterms when Republicans got just absolutely shellacked in the House and lost their majority. It was basically a rejection of Republican-controlled Congress and President Trump. But the president didn't see it that way.

Trump was belligerent at that press conference. He attacked reporters in the room. That's not terribly unusual, though his screaming match with CNN's Jim Acosta was particularly harsh. But what really sticks out to me was the way he celebrated the defeat of a number of House Republicans who distanced themselves from him. It was bizarre. It was petty. It was even a little bit funny. The Republican congresswoman from Utah, Mia Love, quote, gave me no love, Trump quipped. About Mike Kaufman, a veteran Republican congressman from the Denver suburbs who'd lost to a younger Democratic challenger, Trump said, too bad, Mike. Just twisting the knife even more. Losing the House was a huge deal for Trump. It meant the functional end of his legislative agenda, a series of investigations.

and his impeachment. Twice. But his reaction to all of it was mostly to pretend it didn't happen. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, after Trump's denial of the 2020 election results helped spur a deadly riot at the Capitol. And now it all threatens to tear apart a political party for which he never had that much loyalty in the first place.

Michael Cruz is Politico's Trumpologist, as our regular listeners know. And his reporting has taken him to a lot of Trump rallies around the country. I'll remember sitting in the press pen

at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, listening to the blunt chant of send her back at Trump's mention of Somali-American Minnesota Rep Ilhan Omar. I'll remember reporting along the snaking lines in the parking lot outside an arena in Charlotte before a 2020 rally the day before Super Tuesday, peeling off for periodic squirts from a bottle of hand sanitizer at the window of a food truck, listening to Trump supporters tell me the coronavirus was like a common cold and the only people it would kill would be the old and the weak. I'll remember driving on next to no sleep from Dayton, Ohio, where I had spent election night in 2016, to Columbus to catch my flight home, thinking the next four or more years would be not at all what I was expecting. And like nothing we'd ever seen.

Everyone's favorite nerd, Zach Montalaro, remembers a piece of voting rights legislation.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act. And what this bill is would be a sweeping, sweeping overhaul of the federal election system.

That passed the House but failed in the Senate. And seeing the late civil rights icon and Congressman John Lewis speak.

Hearing somebody like John Lewis speaking about this is truly a moment that I haven't really replicated.

The right to vote is precious.

The Capitol, for me at least, is a humbling building. It's a building that I don't go to a lot for my job. But when I do, I like to stop and take a moment and kind of reflect what it represents in our country's history and what it represents going forward. So to be there and to hear someone like John Lewis speak, you don't really forget that.

For health care reporter Sarah Overmull, one story looms larger than all the others. And it makes sense. The coronavirus pandemic. In the early days, we didn't know a lot about it.

Every single day we were learning new information about the virus, how it spreads, what it does to people.

Sarah watched as Trump gave daily briefings. She remembers how Trump created a connection between his re-election and claiming to have beaten the virus.

One of the biggest things that those briefings did, besides take up me and my colleagues' time every single night, was to marry President Trump to the pandemic's fate. He repeated assurances over and over again about progress, saying vaccines were right around the corner. And he made success against the virus a sort of personal connection to his presidency and his campaign. He made himself the face of it. The day that he talked about injecting bleach, I was like, how on earth do we deal with what the president is saying? And are his health officials going to counter him right now? And it was that day, the day that he talked about injecting bleach, that actually for a good amount of time, the daily press briefings on the coronavirus ended. And when they started to pick back up, the president was not a strong feature in them.

Politics, race and demographics reporter Maya King went on a reporting trip to understand the Georgia runoff elections.

I just remember this feeling among voters and activists and elected officials, particularly those on the Democratic side, that Georgia would be making some kind of history that year in 2020. And you could really feel it, that there was a belief that something might change.

There were some moments and people that folks here are going to miss. Here's Meredith McGraw again.

I'll miss working with the Trump White House press corps. We lived through and covered this incredibly consequential and unimaginable in so many ways chapter in history and became really close going to these wild rallies, questioning the president, dropping everything to go cover something, having our eyes glued to our phones, expecting a tweet. We all really understood what it was like to cover Trump day after day, and I really will miss working with everyone. It was a pretty wild ride.

And what will the next four years look like? That's what we'll all be watching.

My name is Stephen Overly, and I write about global trade and technology for Politico. One recent memory of the Trump administration that I don't think I'll ever forget was the night Trump was banned from Twitter because for four years, President Trump used his Twitter account to make major policy.

announcements to fire senior administration officials. All the noise. All the chatter. It was almost as if this cacophony of noise just suddenly fell silent.

All right, that's our show. Our producer is Annie Reese. Our senior producer is Jenny Amand, and our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our illustrator is Bill Cookman. And a big thank you to a lot of Politico colleagues who helped out with this week's episode. Anthony Adragna, Ben Lefebvre, Ben White, Charlie Matesian, Darius Dixon, Eugene Daniels, John Harris, Maggie Severns, Matt Daly, Matt Worker, Maya King, Megan Casella, Meredith McGraw, Michael Cruz, Natalie Fertig, Paul Demko, Ryan Heath, Sarah Overmall, Steve Shepard, Stephen Overly, Tara Palmieri, Tyler Wyatt, and Zach Montalaro. If you like our show, then like it. Leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It helps more people find the show. And check out some of our other podcasts while you're at it. There's Politico Dispatch, Politico Energy, and Pulse Check, just to name a few. We'll talk to you again next week. Yep, cool. All right. I never know how to end these, so I'm just gonna stop recording. Goodbye.