How the ex-Obama aides of Pod Save America lost faith in candidate Biden

On 15 June, Joe Biden flew to Los Angeles for a star-studded campaign fundraiser with Barack Obama, Jimmy Kimmel, Julia Roberts and George Clooney.

Three of the hosts of the influential Democratic podcast Pod Save America were among the guests and later said the event left them disturbed. The former Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor said they and other guests had found it “chilling”.

Seeing Biden in person made them worry about how much the president had aged in recent years, Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter, would tell CNN later. And they weren’t the only ones.

“Every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing, except for the people working for Joe Biden,” Favreau said.

Since 2017, Pod Save America, founded by a group of former Obama aides, has emerged as a progressive media powerhouse, quickly gaining an average of 1.5 million listeners each episode, as well as a reputation for being the Democratic party’s best answer to the power of conservative talk radio.

Now, with the Democratic party in an unprecedented crisis over Biden’s capacity to serve another term, the Pod Save America hosts have emerged as some of the most high-profile proponents of Biden dropping out of the race, even as they have pledged to fight hard to elect him if he becomes the official nominee.

They aren’t the only members of the Obama circle publicly questioning Biden’s ability to win; David Axelrod, Obama’s former political adviser, has called Biden “dangerously out of touch”, while David Plouffe, his former campaign adviser, called the debate a “Defcon 1 moment”.

Jen Psaki, a former press secretary in both the Obama and Biden White Houses, appeared as a Pod Save America guest on Wednesday, where she said that Nancy Pelosi’s comments made it clear Pelosi did not want Biden to stay in the race, and said that the best potential alternative to Biden was “clearly Kamala Harris”.

Taken together, the comments have raised questions about whether Obama himself believes his former vice-president should continue as the party’s candidate in the 2024 election, even as the former president has defended Biden publicly. George Clooney reportedly called Obama to let him know he was planning to publish a damning op-ed in the New York Times questioning Biden’s competence to serve as president, and while he did not encourage Clooney’s effort, “he also didn’t object to it”, Politico reported.

The podcast’s public skepticism of whether Biden can win again is also noteworthy because it comes from a group of Democrats who have built their media brand on savvy boosterism, not doom or division.

The Pod Save America co-hosts, who also include Jon Lovett and Daniel Pfeiffer, built a powerful media platform during the early Trump years as insider-outsiders: a group of idealistic Obama bros who had actually served in the White House and could offer listeners both their high-level connections and a “no bullshit” take on Democratic politics. “We’re not running for office. So we just speak our mind,” Favreau said in one early interview.

While the hosts always embraced the reality that their show’s influence comes in part from its entertainment value, they have also argued that Trump “wins when more people are cynical about politics and politicians”.

“Our job is to give people a reason to believe and participate in politics, which means our version of entertainment can’t be as frivolous or nasty or dishonest,” Favreau said in 2017.

The Biden campaign has pushed back against Pod Save America’s critical commentary, with Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager, criticizing post-debate comments from “your panicked aunt, your Maga uncle, or some self-important podcasters”, in a campaign email.

Favreau hasn’t directly called on Biden to drop out . But his response to Clooney’s op-ed calling on Biden to drop out of the race was to tell CNN’s Dana Bash about the fundraiser both he and Clooney attended, and to say: “I was there. Clooney was exactly right.”

Favreau has also repeatedly shared polling data unfavorable to Biden, including one showing that a majority of voters think Biden should be replaced as the nominee and is too old to govern effectively. And he responded to reporting from Ezra Klein, which said that many Democratic insiders do not think Biden can win but are afraid to criticize him publicly because of personal blowback, by calling it “absolutely fucking enraging”.

Jon Lovett, another former Obama speechwriter, has been even more bluntly critical. In a post on X on Wednesday, Lovett argued that “there have always been two Joe Bidens”, one “empathetic, decent, big-hearted”, and one a “blowhard with a chip on his shoulder”.

“It’s hard to deny that in the two weeks since the debate, it’s the arrogant and small Joe Biden we’ve seen most – hanging on, bragging, defensive, angry, weak,” Lovett wrote. “Joe Biden can leave office as one of the greatest presidents in our lifetimes, who defeated Trump and put his country first at every turn; or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy and perhaps our democracy with it.”

With Democrats intensely divided over whether Biden should be replaced as the nominee, the Pod Save America hosts are being more explicit than many elected Democrats about their concerns – though they are still walking a delicate line of criticism and loyalty, not just to Biden, but to the staffers inside his administration.

On Thursday, as Biden’s campaign was attempting to reassure voters with a live press conference, the Pod Save America hosts were giving interviews across digital and TV outlets, flagging their continuing concerns.

In an interview with Semafor, Vietor said he felt “guilty” about how his comments would land with “friends of mine who are working in the White House”, and how they might make their hard jobs harder, but that said, in the end, “it’s not about Joe Biden, it’s not about anyone working for him. It’s about the future of the country.”

Favreau has argued that Democrats’ slowness to raise concerns about Biden’s capacity is “not some conspiracy”, and that people who had seen him in person in recent months had watched him go up and down. “People were wrestling with this, [thinking] ‘Maybe he’s tired,’” Favreau told Jon Stewart in an interview this week.

“It sounds like the change, the decline, was pretty rapid,” Vietor said during the same interview.

The Los Angeles fundraiser was not the first time Favreau had been concerned about Biden’s capacities, he told Stewart. The night before the White House correspondents dinner in April, Favreau had seen Biden, and his demeanor left Favreau “very worried”. Then Biden had given a good speech at the dinner and “I was like, OK, maybe he was just tired.’”

After the Los Angeles fundraiser in mid-June, Favreau recalled his wife, Emily, a PR strategist, turning to him and asking him: “What are we going to do?”

He told CNN his response was again: wait. Biden would be debating Donald Trump in less than two weeks. Perhaps the Biden they had all seen at the fundraiser had just been exhausted after flying directly from negotiations in Europe to Los Angeles. Maybe Biden’s debate performance would reassure them. Or, he recalled telling her, Biden would give the same impression at the televised debate as he did at the private fundraiser, “and then the whole country will be talking about it”.

When the debate proved to be, in his words, “a fucking disaster”, Favreau and his Pod Save America co-hosts sounded the alarm. In a podcast episode released the following morning, they pushed for a full public debate over whether Biden should continue as nominee.

Favreau has argued the Democratic party’s responses to Biden’s public struggles have been far too reminiscent of the GOP’s relationship with Trump. The anonymous Democrats who told reporters they were alarmed about Biden, but refused to give their names, reminded him of “all these Republicans telling reporters like, ‘We don’t want Trump. I don’t like Trump. I think Trump is crazy, but I don’t want to be the one to say that because I don’t want to get in trouble.’

“We don’t want to be like that,” Favreau said.