The Podcast About Trump's Threat to Democracy That Was Never Published
An insider's account of how the media botched the 2024 election
One way that media organizations failed in 2024 is about what they didn’t publish.
At Politico, where I worked, we were as guilty as everyone else when it came to the most discussed blindspot of the election: not reporting aggressively enough on Joe Biden’s mental decline.
What has been less discussed, is how some news organizations failed to devote proper attention to what was the most crucial issue about Trump: the threat that he posed to democracy.
I saw this up close. I was the executive producer of Politico’s flagship podcast, Deep Dive. I had almost complete editorial freedom for most of my tenure running the show. But there was one episode that was never published.
The taboo show was about how, if Trump were elected, he was likely to break the law, defy the courts, and pursue an anti-democratic weaponization of the federal government. If you listen to the interview now, almost every word from our guest seems prescient. If anything, he understated what Trump would do. But the interview never aired.
Until now.
Read on for the whole backstory and to listen to the full interview.