#213 The 2020 Election: A First Draft w/ Robert Costa
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2021
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2020 Presidential election was one of the most tumultuous in American history, and while Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump is settled, Trump's refusal to accept defeat has had implications that transcend his time in the oval office. In this episode, Bob and Ben speak with Robert Costa, whose new book Peril draws on his and co-author Bob Woodward's extensive investigation of the Biden and Trump campaigns and Trump's handling of executive power during his time in office. Robert explains how he finds and vets sources, his method of "deep background" interviews, and how he maintains journalistic disinterest in the face of intense partisan conflict. He also discusses what he learned about Trump and Biden as candidates and individuals and why he believes that the peril that characterized the Trump-Biden transition remains a source of concern more than a year after the 2020 election.
Robert Costa is a national political reporter at The Washington Post and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. You can follow him on twitter at @CostaReports.
If you enjoyed this conversation, check out our previous conversation with Robert in RTN #130 Sources, Methods & Music w/ Robert Costa.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:06.4 | And I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:08.1 | And this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:10.6 | Today, the Road to Now brings you to Washington, D.C. |
| 0:15.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:16.5 | Not that long ago, as it turns out. |
| 0:19.5 | Today, the Road to Now brings us to Washington, D.C. and national political reporter for the Washington Post and co-author of Peril, which is now, I believe, seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. |
| 0:33.3 | Co-authored with Bob Woodward. |
| 0:34.8 | Our guest today is Robert Costa. |
| 0:37.0 | And Ben, I've been excited to have |
| 0:38.9 | Robert on the show for a while since the book came out. I know we've been reading it, |
| 0:46.0 | kind of going back over it this week. Pretty incredible, isn't it? It is pretty incredible. And it's not |
| 0:53.4 | just incredible as a book. |
| 0:54.6 | It's not just incredible because it answers a lot of the questions that I think a lot of us have about the 2020 election. |
| 1:00.4 | It's incredible because of the sourcing, just the number of people that are involved, the words in this, the actual transcripts that they were able to access, where you're actually seeing, |
| 1:14.1 | you're seeing this history being written in real time. And one of the things I'm excited |
| 1:19.5 | about talking with Robert about is just the magnitude of that and how you sort through it. |
| 1:26.5 | Because, you know, Bob, the things I've published |
| 1:30.3 | have been about people who have long been dead. I don't have to wonder if they're going to pop |
| 1:34.4 | in for a new interview and shed some new light on the situation. And knowing when to stop is got to be |
| 1:39.1 | impossible, or next to impossible, I'll say. Right. And the story, the story has not ended. And so let's get in there |
| 1:47.2 | with, with, with Robert right now and, and get some answers from him. You got it. Bob Costa, |
... |
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