Ex-Obama aide admits he held back on criticizing Biden's decline because he 'wanted him to f------ win'
Ex-Obama aide and "Pod Save America" co-host Jon Lovett admitted on Jon Stewart's "The Weekly Show" podcast that he withheld his concerns about President Joe Biden's physical decline during the 2024 campaign.
Lovett told Stewart and his fellow "Pod Save America" host Jon Favreau that he didn't want to publicly voice his concern over Biden's declining health because he wanted him "to f------ win."
"I remember feeling I want to talk about this as a huge liability. To talk about this is something Joe Biden can overcome, but I'm not going to go so far as to say, 'I think Joe Biden must drop out. He is too old to be president,'" Lovett said on the podcast. "A, because I didn't know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, but B, if Joe Biden is the candidate, I want him to f------ win."
Jon Stewart, 'Pod Save America' Question Biden's Health In Wake Of 'Original Sin' Book
Lovett said he was worried that expressing his concerns would be weaponized against Biden by political opponents.
He claimed he kept his concerns to himself to avoid "having the words we're saying taken out of context and all of a sudden be part of the case against Joe Biden from the right — that would use any person criticizing Joe Biden from the left as a weapon against him."
Read On The Fox News App
"So it was about being honest about Joe Biden's age as a liability while knowing that if he is the nominee, I want to be clear that I thought it was important to make sure we did everything we could to reelect him," Lovett claimed.
Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture
CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson have recently drawn attention to Biden's health while promoting their new book, "Original Sin," which covered the former president's decline and the alleged cover-up by his administration to keep it under wraps.
Lovett is featured in "Original Sin" in an anecdote where he and his "Pod Save America" co-hosts Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer met with Biden at the White House on April 26, 2024. The book described them as "deeply disturbed" after their discussions with Biden that night, with the authors describing the president as rambling and "incoherent."
Fox News' Rachel del Guidice contributed to this report.Original article source: Ex-Obama aide admits he held back on criticizing Biden's decline because he 'wanted him to f------ win'
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


New York Times
34 minutes ago
- New York Times
How Hard Will Musk Fight Republicans' Budget Bill?
Can Musk kill the budget bill? Elon Musk hasn't stopped criticizing the budget bill that he has called a 'disgusting abomination.' In fact, he appears to be just getting started. The debate in Washington now is how far Musk will go to try to defeat a bill that — by the assessment of Musk, several Republicans and now nonpartisan watchdogs — will vastly add to the federal debt. 'KILL THE BILL,' Musk posted on X on Wednesday, a message he urged followers to press with members of Congress. He has turned a majority of his feed into a stream of reposts of content criticizing the legislation and denouncing its effect on the nation's $36 trillion debt load. A string of assessments suggest that the bill will add to the debt. The most consequential, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated that the House version of the plan would add $2.4 trillion over the next decade, given both the roughly $3.8 trillion tax cut at its core and additional spending. (Other estimates are even higher, including the Penn Wharton Budget Model's: $2.8 trillion.) A Republican counter: Attack the messenger. The Trump administration advanced hard-to-believe claims about C.B.O. staff members' partisanship, and arguments that its analysis ignores projected economic growth. That said, a previous nonpartisan analysis of the House bill found that the tax cuts would generate nearly no additional economic growth, and even conservatives found the budget office's analysis credible. 'When all the models are in unison,' Erica York, the vice president for federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told The Times, 'it really doesn't make sense to triple down on the strategy to blame the scorekeeper.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.


The Hill
34 minutes ago
- The Hill
Ocasio-Cortez endorses Zohran Mamdani in NYC mayor's race
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday endorsed socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race just days before early voting kicks off. 'Assemblymember Mamdani has demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers that is strongest to lead the pack,' Ocasio-Cortez told The New York Times in an interview announcing her endorsement. 'In the final stretch of the race, we need to get very real about that.' The move is sure to buoy those on the left who have coalesced around Mamdani as the best progressive alternative to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), the current frontrunner to succeed Mayor Eric Adams (D), who is running for reelection as an independent. Cuomo is seeking a comeback after resigning from his job in 2021 as governor amid sexual harassment allegations. The race also comes as a battle plays out among Democrats over the future of the party following President Trump's victory in November, with Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) representing the progressive wing looking to push the party toward a more populist agenda. Ocasio-Cortez's endorsement comes less than 12 hours after Mamdani squared off with Cuomo and seven other candidates in a rowdy, often chaotic debate that saw no clear winner. Cuomo has maintained a strong lead in polls over the last several months, making him the candidate to beat. But Mamdani, a progressive State Assembly member endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, has surged into second place in recent weeks. A recent Emerson College Polling/PIX11/The Hill survey had the former governor leading in the primary's first round of voting with 35 percent. Mamdani came in at second with 23 percent. Perhaps in a sign of his newfound momentum, Cuomo focused many of his attacks Wednesday night on the progressive, in multiple instances lambasting Mamdani for past criticism he made about former President Obama. Primary voters will head to the polls in person on June 24. Whoever emerges as the winner of the Democratic primary will be the clear favorite to lead the city. New York City employs a ranked-choice voting system, meaning primary voters will have the opportunity to rank up to five candidates by order of preference. When their top choices are eliminated, those votes are then dispersed to candidates they had ranked lower.


Fox News
36 minutes ago
- Fox News
Oregon girls open up on 'traumatic' trans athlete experiences that pushed them to fight back
Oregon high school senior Alexa Anderson is now a budding conservative heroine, but she comes from a family of Democrats. When the Tigard High School track and field star refused to stand on the same podium as a trans athlete at the state championship on Saturday, alongside fellow medalist Reese Eckard, Anderson learned right away the treatment an act like that prompted from the political side her family traditionally aligned with. "When me and Reese stepped down there was definitely some confusion, there was definitely some anger and just a lot of people who didn't understand why were were doing this, and it was scary. Everyone was looking at us," Anderson told Fox News Digital. "There was a lot of people on and off the field. I heard shouts of them telling us to get out of the way." The backlash did not end on the field. "There has also been a handful of people that just really don't understand that are reaching out and are calling me a bad person," she added. "When I received one of the first hate comments I kind of just brushed it off, I responded saying 'thank you for sharing your opinion, I respect your opinion, this is mine and this is what I stood for' but it didn't really bother me too much because I was prepared for it, I knew this was going to happen, and I have so many people behind me, supporting me and that number greatly outweighs the people who have been hateful toward me." Anderson was warned by friends, coaches and family about what would happen if she took the stand she took. However, she felt she had to do something as soon as she found out she would be competing against the trans athlete last week. The teen considered withdrawing from the competition altogether, but could not bring herself to waste all of her hard work to get to that point. So she and Eckard came up with the podium idea. Anderson had never even competed against a trans athlete herself in competition prior to that point, but she felt compelled to demonstrate her opposition for the sake of the other girls across the country, especially in her state, who have been impacted by trans inclusion. One of those girls is Glencoe High School junior Lily Hammond. As a sophomore in the winter of 2023-24, Hammond said she unknowingly competed against and shared a locker room with a biological male opponent on another team. She said she competed against the athlete multiple times, assuming the athlete was a biological female. "It wasn't until the last meet that I realized 'oh, that is a trans person,' and by that point it was too late," Hammond told Fox News Digital. "The shock that came was the mistrust and the lying, I felt very betrayed, I felt betrayed by the adults and the coaches on the other team that let it happen without my consent and my knowledge. My team didn't know, my coach didn't know… I felt very violated knowing that a man could have seen me changing." Hammond said she already had to deal with transgender students at her high school entering the girls' restrooms on a regular basis, but she called the experience with her swim team "traumatic." "At the time it was overwhelming and felt traumatic since I was kept in the dark," she said. Hammond is not the only Oregon girl "traumatized" by the issue either. Forest Grove High School senior Maddie Eischen and Newberg High School junior Sophia Carpenter were faced with the prospect of competing against a trans athlete in a state competition called the Chehalem Classic back on April 18. So both of them refused to compete. "I found out the day before, which led to me feeling the need to scratch myself from the meet. The whole day I had anxiety," Eischen told Fox News Digital. "My experience at the Chehalem track meet and scratching myself from the meet was traumatic, something I never imagined ever having to do." Carpenter said she found herself so overwhelmed with emotion from the experience, that she cried on the ride home after the meet. "It was emotionally traumatic trying to know what I should do and how I should respond to competing with [the trans athlete]," Carpenter said. The experience pushed Carpenter to make a visible point when she competed at the state championships this weekend. She showed up to her high jump competition sporting a T-shirt from the activist sportswear brand XX-XY Athletics. Now, beyond just speaking up against the state's current laws that enable males in their sports, Anderson, Hammond and Carpenter suggested the issue will play heavily into how they vote in future political elections. "Just this last election, looking at the different beliefs between the two candidates, you had one candidate who openly believes biological men should be allowed in women's restrooms and women's sports, and was not doing anything, and then you had another candidate who said 'this will be one of the first things I change,' and that's what Donald Trump did," Hammond said. "In the future, that's something I'm going to look for." Carpenter added, "I've always believed in voting based on the constitution… and while Title IX was not one of the first things that was brought up when our country was created, it goes back to the first amendment and basic human rights, and women deserve these rights too, and right now they're being given to men who feel a certain way." Additionally, while the trans athletes that each of the girls faced played into their trauma, their stand against the state's liberal laws on the issue is not directed at those individuals. It is directed at the lawmakers and education officials who have enabled the males to get to that point. "I feel that they've just been misled," Hammond said. "The faculty at my school is feeding this, the faculty at other schools are feeding this saying 'it's okay if you want to be another person.'" In the last few days, Oregon has become one of the nation's heated battlegrounds on the issues, as the state represents symbolic significance in the sport of track and field. Eugene, Oregon, nicknamed "TrackTown USA," often hosts the World Athletics Championships, U.S. Olympic Trials and NCAA Championships. Now, Anderson's stunt at the high school state championship has put the state under a national microscope and a legal firm has already taken steps to bring federal action against the state. While the Trump administration has focused much of its attention on the issues in Maine and California, launching federal investigations and even a Department of Justice lawsuit against Maine, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) filed a civil rights complaint calling for federal intervention. "Our investigation into Title IX and First Amendment violations in Oregon is about standing up for girls and women sidelined, silenced, and stripped of the fairness and freedom they're guaranteed under federal law," AFPI senior legal strategy attorney Leigh Ann O'Neill told Fox News Digital. "When young women are told to compete against male athletes or stay quiet—or, worse, are punished for speaking the truth—we have to act. Because no one is above the Constitution—not even state sports officials." Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.