836: The Big Rethink

Ira Glass

For three weeks, Joe Biden said as forcefully as a human being possibly could say that he would not step down. And for three weeks, it was this agonizing drip, drip, drip of people trying to get him to reconsider and of voters around the country wondering if he was going to reconsider.

Fed by a steady stream of daily news stories that read tea leaves and applied electron microscopes to the tiniest scraps of evidence, looking for any minuscule signs indicating that maybe it could happen, maybe Biden would rethink things. Democrats wondering what it might take to change Biden's mind.

Meanwhile, over in the other half of the country, in red-state America, at the Republican National Convention, people who had changed their minds and reconsidered firmly held convictions were a big part of the festivities. Donald Trump picked his vice president, a man who once said about him, "My god, what an idiot," JD Vance. Nikki Haley, who had once called Trump unhinged, and other former Trump rivals, people who once seemed like they hated Trump and spoken out against him, took the stage to show how they'd reconsidered.

And even Trump himself, the centerpiece of the whole thing, seemed to be presenting himself as a changed man, somebody who had reconsidered who he wants to be in the wake of his near assassination. He presented a notably gentler, uniter-not-divider side of himself. All this reconsideration, of course, was in the service of getting the swing voters of the swing states to do some reconsideration of their own about who they might be picking for president this fall.

I sometimes feel like the rarest thing in the world is to witness somebody actually changing their mind. You know what I mean? Changing their mind about something big, some fundamental belief. I mean, I know it happens, right? Most of us know people who are never going to have kids who decide they're going to go for it, or Democrats who became Republicans, pro-lifers who switched to pro-choicers.

When it happens, it's a seismic thing. And that point of transition, when you're flipping from one way of seeing things to the new way, that is a weird, awkward thing to live through.

And so today on our show, in this moment when Joe Biden seems to have reconsidered some of his most deeply held ideas about himself and his chances in this election, we have stories of people rethinking some big, basic beliefs that they've taken for granted, trying on a new attitude toward the world. And we watch how that goes for them. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, Fate of the Union. Of all the people who'd rethought their feelings about Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, there was one guest for whom the rethink has been especially dramatic, and that's Sean O'Brien. A lifelong Democrat from Massachusetts, Sean O'Brien is the head of the Teamsters Union. 1.3 million truck drivers, rail, air, all transportation, delivery workers, lots of jobs, they endorsed Biden in 2020.

And Sean O'Brien was at the RNC to give a speech-- a big speech, actually, the keynote speech on the first night of the convention. I should say, the Teamsters Union president hasn't spoken at the RNC ever before in the entire history of the union, because-- maybe this is obvious-- Republicans have been the party of big business and generally pretty opposed to organized labor. Zoe Chace tells how this played out.

Zoe Chace

Here's how weird it is that this guy, Sean O'Brien, is at the RNC in the first place. President Biden, a Democrat, calls himself the most pro-union president in history. There's reasons. He bailed out union pensions. The Teamsters were pushing for that. All his major infrastructure bills have included money and benefits specifically for unions. He walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers. He gave his first 2020 campaign speech from a Teamsters Hall.

Donald Trump has a record, too, as a Republican president, of rolling back regulations that protected unions, appointing Supreme Court justices who ruled against unions, and of course, hiring non-union workers when he was a real estate developer, notoriously stiffing his workers out of overtime. Both of them talk about loving American workers, obviously. That's politics. But their policies are very different.

So when Teamsters President Sean O'Brien showed up at the Republican Convention this week, he felt like an outsider right away. Or maybe he wanted to make the point that he was an outsider right away.

Zoe Chace

They're telling Sean how to walk across the stage to the podium. He's going to be the keynote speaker on night one.

Zoe Chace

He's like, it was a bad example. OK.

Zoe Chace

Sean O'Brien seems to be here to walk a fine line, basically, with Republicans. He's like, look, this is a major prime-time slot where you don't expect to hear from us, where we get to talk to people who aren't usually listening. He describes his mission as enlightening the Republican National Convention on how important workers and unions are to this country, and maybe make some new political allies.

He's been on this charm offensive with Republicans for months. He went to Mar-a-Lago. He met with Trump, took a thumbs-up picture with him. He's been meeting with Republican senators, including hard-line conservative Josh Hawley, who ended up walking union picket lines.

O'Brien told me, we have a really diverse union in all the ways, including politically. A big chunk of his membership supports Trump, and he's here partly for them. But some of organized labor is not happy with him at all. It's hard to overstate. Appalled, enraged, apoplectic, horrified. A vice president of the Teamsters Union publicly called it unconscionable.

Zoe Chace

This is Rick Smith's radio show. He's a 35-year Teamster, a truck driver. He thinks O'Brien's just going to be part of the Trump campaign's long-running political theater of being a party for blue-collar workers without making any actual policy that helps those workers. To him, it's like, what's O'Brien going to get for this?

Zoe Chace

So to see how this song and dance goes over, I pick my spot way up high in the stands and sit with some delegates. I find Todd Gilman, this delegate from Michigan I know, and make him watch Sean O'Brien's speech with me. Todd's retired, a Navy vet. He was in a union decades ago. He got involved with the Republican Party just a few years ago. And he's organizing a county commissioner race now. We're chatting.

Zoe Chace

Todd has never heard of Sean O'Brien and does not care about him, it seems. All he knows about Teamsters is, where did the mafia bury Jimmy Hoffa's body? We're waiting for O'Brien's spot in the lineup when, suddenly, an unannounced guest appears.

Zoe Chace

Trump himself, not scheduled to speak, shows up on screen with a dramatically bandaged ear. It's the first night of the convention, our first time seeing him, and his first time in public since the assassination attempt. The crowd is losing it, the cameras following him down the hall toward the convention room like he's a fighter headed into the ring.

Zoe Chace

The crowd is jonesing for Trump, but Trump does not take the stage. He sits in the audience. And instead, the guy who appears on stage is--

Zoe Chace

Country singer.

"Proud to Be an American" is Trump's theme song this campaign. It's generally a signal he's about to take the stage. Only this time, the singer himself is here live, giving a sort of impromptu prayer benediction as images of Trump waving and grimacing appear on screen, turning the white-swaddled ear from side to side.

Zoe Chace

The crowd sings "Proud to Be an American" with enthusiasm, then chants for Trump.

[CHANTING "WE WANT TRUMP"]

But Trump still does not take the stage. Instead, this random guy limps out and stands there, one of the many regular Americans on the program who feel hurt by Biden's policies. He's dubbed onscreen as a grandfather. You've got to feel for him. The crowd is chanting, we want Trump, right into his face. Then another rando with the same story of not being able to afford stuff. Then Amber Rose-- how to describe-- model and influencer talks about seeing the light and voting Republican.

Zoe Chace

Overall, the vibes are way off. Trump's still in the room. People are clamoring for him to speak. And then finally, the last speaker of the night, instead of Trump, it's the president of the Teamsters Union, the outsider guy, the person who doesn't necessarily belong here.

Zoe Chace

Clearly, O'Brien has some assumptions about union bosses to overcome with this crowd.

Zoe Chace

OK, big applause. And it just gets bigger.

Zoe Chace

Biggest applause line of the night by far, like the catharsis of waiting for Trump is satisfied by this, a line that Sean will tell me he came up with right then, wasn't on the teleprompter. He was just feeling it. My Michigan delegate, Todd, is cheering, along with his military buddy, Bob, from Wisconsin. Bob leans over.

Zoe Chace

Now, the Teamsters are not endorsing Trump tonight. Sean O'Brien has been quite clear about that. But Bob from Wisconsin is just hearing the Teamsters throw their weight behind Trump. He's not paying close attention to the specifics of what Sean is saying, really. And as it goes on, the speech does get much more specific and much less Republican Convention-sounding, basically. He throws long-standing Republican allies, mainstays of the party, under the bus.

Zoe Chace

He talks about major American companies, not as great examples of entrepreneurship, like at a typical Republican Convention, but as great examples of corporate greed.

Zoe Chace

People are like, am I with this? Companies are bad? It's a little awkward. But then O'Brien pulls out a magic word that sells in this room.

Zoe Chace

At some point, the crowd seems to hear themselves cheering wildly for organized labor and against corporatists. And it does get a little more strained-feeling in the room.

Zoe Chace

Right to work! Right to work! Someone is heckling the Teamster president kind of wonkily by screaming out the name of a policy that Teamsters hate. Right to work is a shot directly into the heart of unions' ability to organize. It's at the very center of Republican labor policy.

Right to work allows workers to work in a union shop without having to pay union dues. Advocates of the policy say workers should get to choose what they want. Unions hate it because they say workers then get the benefits of the contract without paying for it. It undercuts their power. There's over 150 Republicans co-sponsoring right-to-work bills in Congress right now. Trump has said he supports right to work.

Sean O'Brien continues to slam big business. And I'm almost expecting him to talk about Bernie's millionaires and billionaires. The applause in the room is getting weaker.

Zoe Chace

By the end of the speech, Todd's feeling about this guy he'd never heard of before--

Zoe Chace

When I talked to O'Brien after the speech, in the lobby of the grand Pfister Hotel, I wanted to know if he felt what I was feeling, about the awkwardness in the room, the uncertain silence, when he started wailing on the Chamber of Commerce and big American companies.

Zoe Chace

Overall, he feels pretty great about the speech. He got his message out. He thinks that now, he'll get calls from Republican legislators who weren't meeting with him before. Like, there's this one Senate bill right now that the big unions are really fighting for. It's called the PRO Act, Protecting the Right to Organize Act.

Zoe Chace

Now, the very next day, the Teamsters announced there was a new co-sponsor of the House version of the bill, a third Republican House member from Oregon. Because of the speech? We don't know.

Rick Smith, the 35-year Teamster with the radio show, watched the convention, watched the speech from his union president, and I called him afterwards.

Zoe Chace

Rick saw Sean's speech as just another piece of the political theater playing out at the RNC, more working man cosplay, like Trump's selection of JD Vance as vice president, in his opinion. Sean O'Brien praised Vance in his speech. Vance's brand is kind of made-in-America economic populism. He famously walked a UAW picket line in Toledo.

Zoe Chace

O'Brien's response is, maybe the snake is changing. We can make them change. Parties change. You can't get things done if that's your uncompromising approach.

Zoe Chace

This sounds either wickedly pragmatic or hopelessly naive. But however much the Democrats and Joe Biden have done for organized labor, the Democrats could definitely lose in November. And Trump, who was sitting right across the hall from O'Brien up on stage performing, watching him closely with that martyred ear, he might be the guy he'll have to negotiate with.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Act two, Out on a Limb. You know who July hasn't been so great for? The Democratic politicians who were out front before anybody, publicly calling for President Biden to drop out of the election.

Out of 260 Democrats who sit in the House and Senate, only 21 stepped forward, 20 from the House of Representatives and one senator, for the first three weeks after the presidential debate. No Democratic governors. No former presidents. But this small group called for Biden to drop out, hoping an army was going to form behind them. Then a week passed, then another week, and the battalions did not show up. They hung out there by themselves.

Finally, at the end of this week, we heard about big names in the party, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, behind the scenes, urging the president to step aside. With that cover, going into the weekend, the number of elected lawmakers started edging up very slowly. And finally, of course, Joe Biden bowed out of the race. But it took over three weeks for things to get to this point.

So what was it like for the people who stuck their necks out and waited? Well, Congressman Seth Moulton agreed to talk to me about all that. He's a Democrat from Massachusetts, a rising star in the party, had a brief presidential run himself in 2020, a former Marine who served four tours in Iraq. In fact, he led a platoon in the first company to enter Baghdad.

Years ago, he did a memorable interview on our program about this interpreter who he worked with and got close to in Iraq who ended up coming to the States and living in Moulton's childhood home with his parents. Basically, he became part of their family while waiting to get asylum because of all the death threats against him for collaborating with Americans.

Joe Biden took an interest in Seth Moulton back when Moulton first ran for Congress in 2014, when Biden was vice president. Biden went to Massachusetts to do a rally endorsing him. And they rode in a car together, where Moulton says the vice president offered him half of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And he was not sure if you're supposed to say no to that offer from the vice president. So he said yes.

Moulton's age and his military experience, Moulton says Biden's told him a few times he reminds him of his son, Beau. Moulton and I spoke this past Monday, July 15. He told me the story of turning his back on Joe Biden starts, of course, on debate night.

Ira Glass

Over the next few days, Moulton says, he tried to call everybody he knew in the White House, anybody close to the inner circle, to express his concerns about the president's performance and the path ahead.

Ira Glass

It's five days after the debate before the first Democratic lawmaker calls for Biden to step down. A day later, a second one does. That same night, Moulton releases a very polite, pretty hedgey statement saying, "I have grave concerns about President Biden's ability to defeat Donald Trump," and then going on to say if the president can't demonstrate that he can do a better job prosecuting the case against Trump, quote, "We should have all viable options on the table." So that goes out.

Ira Glass

And with that, Seth Moulton became the third Democrat to demand the president step down. He told me he didn't expect tons of his colleagues to join him and follow suit, even though so many of them agreed that Biden should step aside. That's just how Congress works, he says. He's in other situations where his colleagues agree on important stuff behind the scenes but don't take a public stand.

Ira Glass

He says he did try to lobby some of his colleagues, told him they should come forward publicly also. And a few did. But generally, most did not. And why not? Fear, best as he can tell. They were scared of ticking off the president and his team, of going against the Democratic establishment, of sticking their necks out.

That fear is not entirely unreasonable. Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Scholten was kicked out of a Democratic Party planning meeting to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts because, Politico reported, the Michigan State Democratic Party didn't like the fact that she called on President Biden to step down.

Moulton told me the main time he heard anybody make any kind of principled argument against speaking out was at a meeting of the Democratic caucus. This is Democratic members of the House. They met 12 days after the debate to discuss Biden.

Ira Glass

Moulton spoke at that meeting. And afterwards, he says, colleagues who were not sticking their necks out publicly continued to tell him that they liked what he was saying and doing in public.

Ira Glass

For a lot of us reading news reports during the three weeks before President Biden dropped out, as the days rolled on and President Biden kept insisting that he didn't think he lost any ground in the race and he wasn't going to listen to anybody but himself on this, the chances of him actually leaving the race seemed to get more and more remote.

But this past Monday, Congressman Moulton told me that from where he sat, the whole thing was still very much an open question, even after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and that photo with his fist in the air.

Ira Glass

Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts. Again, we spoke on Monday, well before the president decided to step down.

Coming up, typing with your pinkies, how it has the power to make you rethink everything about your own sister. We have a true-life example. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Big Rethink, stories of people reconsidering something fundamental about themselves and the way they see themselves and what happens next. We've arrived at Act Three of our show.

Ira Glass

Act three, Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Backwards. OK, so in this time of country-defining decisions, we close our show out today with yet another story of critical import about two sisters and their pinkies, a story Elna Baker stumbled on.

Elna Baker

I was chatting with a friend of a friend, Zoe Kushlefsky, at a bar when she casually mentioned she was about to attempt to break the world record for speed typing the alphabet using only her pinkies. It took me a minute to process. There's a world record for typing with your pinkies? How do you even know that's a thing? Where does that idea even come from? And that's when Zoe said--

Elna Baker

Sisters-- so twisted, right? My sister has something, and I want to take it from her. Here's how it all started. One day, Zoe's sister, Eliza, texted her this. "LOL, I don't know if you heard, but I broke a world record tonight, fastest time typing the alphabet backwards with my pinky fingers. LOL, I did it in 6.31 seconds. And the record is 9.65.

Elna Baker

So Zoe opens her laptop and gives it a try, starts typing the alphabet backwards with her pinkies. She's not great, but she's improving rapidly and live-texting Eliza as she gets better.

Elna Baker

Zoe, right then and there, decided that she would go for trying to beat the record for typing the alphabet with your pinkies forward, like she's not dethroning her sister and taking her record.

Elna Baker

There's a specific kind of mind game endemic to sisterhood. And I want to use this stupid pinky thing to examine that, how something so small can blow up because of deep stuff from the past. Like in Zoe's case, from her perspective, Eliza has always been upstaging her. They're both just a few years out of college, but Eliza is already a software engineer with a high-paying job. Zoe's a nanny. Eliza travels the world. Zoe binge watches Vanderpump Rules.

And Eliza's always racking up some new achievement. Like, she only came up with the idea to break the world record because she needed something to do after running her first half marathon, whereas Zoe feels left behind in life. She moved to LA to become a TV writer but hasn't had the confidence to try yet.

And this leads me to the second thing you need to know. The day Zoe got the text from Eliza, it was a big day for Zoe. Just that afternoon, she had finished four months of treatment in a super intense eating disorder program.

Elna Baker

And that's when-- record scratch-- she got the text from Eliza, and photos. Eliza was surrounded by friends. Everyone's raising their pinkies and celebrating.

Elna Baker

So Zoe finds a typing speed website that can time her and starts rage-typing with her pinkies. To give you an idea of how absurd this looks, hold up your pinkies like Dr. Evil and try to type anything. Now try to do it faster. Now faster. Now repeat that for months. Insane, right? But Zoe became completely fixated on winning.

Zoe and Eliza are stepsisters. When Zoe was eight, her dad met Eliza's mom. And within a couple years, he lived with Eliza's mom and Eliza. Zoe would visit every other weekend. Zoe was already self-conscious about her weight. Her dad was always on her about it. And right away, she started comparing her body to Eliza's.

Elna Baker

For dessert, he might serve Zoe fruit, while Eliza got pie. There'd be little critical comments. Zoe's dad had been fat, lost weight his senior year of high school, and felt like it made life so much easier. He thought he was helping Zoe, but now sees how wrong-headed all that was.

But as a teenager, Zoe decided that since Eliza was thin and got good grades and everything seemed easy for her, that Eliza was the favorite, and she was more of a burden. All these past wounds ready to rip open with one ill-timed text.

Elna Baker

Six months go by, and Zoe's getting faster by the millisecond. Early on, she double-checks with Eliza. Are you sure you're OK with this? And Eliza's like, yeah, sure. So Zoe trains on. Finally, she's ready to go for it.

To officially break the record, Zoe has to video her attempt to break the record and send it into Guinness. And so on the day of her first attempt, she invited friends over.

Elna Baker

Zoe goes up to her computer, holds her hands in the air, cracks her knuckles, and wiggles her fingers, warms up her pinkies.

Elna Baker

4.6 seconds. The record to beat was 5.12. After a few months, Guinness writes her back. She was now the Guinness World Records' time holder. Zoe calls up Eliza to tell her the good news. She let me sit in and record.

Elna Baker

Eliza congratulates her, but also says--

Elna Baker

I felt like I could hear Zoe deflating on the call. She went from cheering and laughing to being ashamed for even caring. This was such a sister counterattack. She seemed so harsh. But when I sat down with Eliza to talk about it, she was warm, self-deprecating.

Elna Baker

So I played the call for her and just asked her, what was up with that?

Elna Baker

Here's the thing. Eliza knew Zoe was recording her. And in good sister fashion, she'd said she was OK with it, but she wasn't really. So she was flustered and uncomfortable. And she had other feelings, too. This itch Zoe has to take her down, Eliza's noticed, and it doesn't feel great. If you look at the story from her perspective, Eliza breaks a world record. And when she first texts her sister, hey, I did this cool thing. Zoe's response is, fuck your thing.

Elna Baker

Eliza didn't say any of this to Zoe, though. She felt like it was a dumb thing to get her feelings hurt over. So instead, she texted Zoe, I dare you. Eliza says, Zoe always trying to one-up her this way-- Eliza doesn't get it.

Elna Baker

Yes, Zoe is married. She lives in a nice house. She and her wife have a great relationship. Eliza hasn't yet checked off those big life boxes. She's also, Eliza told me, the performer of the family, the one who upstages her. Plus, Zoe's the oldest. She's actually the big sister. Eliza's like, you win.

Elna Baker

She told me she had no idea that the day she texted Zoe about her world record was the day Zoe ended treatment. And Zoe never said anything. And she also had no idea that from the time they were kids, Zoe felt inferior to her.

Elna Baker

Eliza says that growing up, she had no idea Zoe thought Eliza was the favorite, the daughter their dad really wanted. She never noticed that she got dessert and Zoe got fruit.

Elna Baker

Since this whole pinky record thing, for the first time, Zoe and Eliza have started talking about all this, directly. They called each other, compared notes. Zoe was like, oops, I didn't say congratulations after you got your record, did I? And Eliza was like, I had no idea you thought my job was cool.

And Zoe, who in one sentence will say she admires Eliza and in the next say she's jealous, has realized that they're two sides of the same coin, and how she feels about Eliza in any given moment has everything to do with how she feels about herself. And she's being more generous with her. It all looks different now, to both of them.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker, she's the cohost of the podcast Pretty Sure I Can Fly with Johnny Knoxville. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Her story was produced by Lilly Sullivan and edited by Nadia Reiman.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Susan Burton and Dana Chivvis and edited by Laura Starecheski. The people who put our show together today include Chris Benderev, Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Hany Hawasly, Henry Larson, Tobin Low, Katherine Rae Mondo, Ryan Rumery, Alix Spiegel, Ike Sriskandarajah, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Barry. Special thanks today to everybody at WUWM, especially David Lee and Ele Ellis. Also thanks to Ben Terris, Mike Elk with PayDay Report, Mike Pesca, Sarah McCammon, Don Gonyea, Jonathan Weisman, and Paula Moura.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. If you're looking for something to listen to during a long drive during this holiday summer or while you're waiting for planes to fly, you can stream from our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. Free, did you hear me? thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's cofounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. When he's in Washington, DC, he actually goes to the same yoga class that Joe Biden does. But the teacher is so overbearing. Torey keeps having to tell her--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.