Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

It is 2025 and Donald Trump is president once again of the United States.

We will, of course, be following the moves of the Donald

and his second administration very closely.

However, it won't just be politics for us this year.

We'll also talk a lot and cover American culture, life and the arts.

I should also remind you, because my producer, Natasha,

will not let me hear the end of it, that we are on Spectator TV. So head to our YouTube channel

to watch that. Today we're going to be talking about last year's election, which was, after all,

an utterly extraordinary election in many ways.

And it is brilliantly covered in a new book called Uncharted, which I've got a copy of it here.

Wave it at the, should I wave it there, wave it there.

It's out now in all good bookshops and, of course, on Amazon and so on.

The subtitle is How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.

And it's a story I followed quite closely last year, but I learned quite a lot from it,

including some pretty amazing revelations. And it is written by Chris Whipple, who joins us

now. Chris Whipple is already a New York Times bestselling author and a documentary maker. Chris,

thank you very much for coming on to Americano. I would like... Good to be with you. Thanks for

having me. Great to have you. I'd like to start with the title of your introduction, which I think speaks to one of the big themes of the stories, which is what really happened with Joe Biden last year.

And the title is, I'm going to bleep out one word, what the F happened to this guy, which is a

quote from a friend of Joe Biden's, I think, who spoke to Joe Biden on the phone and even said

that quote to Joe Biden on the phone. And this is one of the real themes of your book, is that the people around Joe Biden knew that something was wrong and they just didn't know how to deal with his mental and his cognitive decline.

...