In a sprawling new book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, Pager, alongside his former Washington Post colleagues Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf, assembled a deeply reported chronicle of this consequential election cycle, starting back in 2022 before the midterms. Pager argues that while there is obviously much intrigue surrounding the final months of the election, with Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, “in order to really understand how we got to that moment, you need to understand the two years preceding that.” He adds that the book’s “context and that comprehensiveness is really crucial to understanding this election.”
The trio, who conducted 350 interviews, were uniquely positioned to collaborate on such an expansive project, with Dawsey and Arnsdorf covering Donald Trump for the Post and Pager covering Biden. “The scope is really key,” Arnsdorf tells me of the book, which provides dueling portraits of both campaigns. “I think you can tell that we had wide and deep cooperation on both sides,” Dawsey adds. “It’s not a book that has an opinion, or really encourages you to take a side. I think it’s just reporting. And I hope that’s what stands out.”
The authors are trying to break through with new revelations following a string of dishy election postmortems from journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Jon Allen and Amie Parnes, and Chris Whipple. They had some success already, with Politico reporting Monday on one of the book’s scoops, a fateful, six-page campaign memo urging Biden to debate Trump early.
When Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf started this project in 2022, they were all reporting for the Post, where a hallmark of the newsroom is “collaboration,” Pager tells me. “With an election this sprawling and with the amount of reporting that we felt we needed to do, under a very tight timeline, we were able to divide and conquer,” he adds. Soon after the election, however, Pager took a White House reporting job at The New York Times, while Dawsey joined The Wall Street Journal as a political investigations reporter, leaving Arnsdorf as the trio’s last standing Post reporter. “Luckily, almost all of the reporting and most of the writing was done before those of us who started new jobs started them,” Arnsdorf says, adding that they’re “working through” the challenges of being at different outlets during publication.
Dawsey and Pager aren’t the only ones to have left the Post in the last year, as the newspaper has experienced a significant restructuring under the leadership of publisher and CEO Will Lewis and owner Jeff Bezos, who caused shockwaves just ahead of the 2024 election for thwarting the Opinion board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The book’s acknowledgement section is filled with names of recently departed Post staffers, including Matea Gold, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer. When Dawsey and Pager were asked to reflect on their time at the newspaper and how it has changed recently, they remained diplomatic, expressing appreciation. “The newsroom of The Washington Post is a wonderful place, and I hope that it gets to stay,” Dawsey says.
Regardless, their experience at the Post, past or present, placed no limits on sneaking a detail into the epilogue regarding Bezos and Trump’s blossoming relationship. According to the book, the pair started to speak regularly after the election, “commiserating over critical stories” published by Bezos’s newspaper. When asked how that revelation went over internally, Arnsdorf replied, “No one said anything to me about it.”
