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INSIDE MAN
A conversation with CNN's correspondent Phil Mattingly
interview by Robert Cocuzzo
Phil Mattingly describes himself as a “straight news guy.” No commentary, no punditry—just the facts. Before being elevated to CNN chief White House correspondent covering the Biden White House, Mattingly wielded his fast-talking, typewriter-like reporting in the halls of Congress and more recently on the campaign trail. A witness to history, he was in the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection and saw firsthand just how fragile American democracy can be.
Off the air, Mattingly is part of a growing contingent of CNN personalities and Washington insiders who spend their summers on Nantucket where the family of Mattingly’s wife Chelsea has owned a home for many years. The morning after the Senate passed the budget deal to raise the debt ceiling, Mattingly shared his thoughts about working in the White House, covering President Biden, and the upcoming election.
Tell us a little bit about your Nantucket connection.
I didn’t really know much or anything about Nantucket. I was an Army brat and then went to high school and college in Ohio. When I started dating my now-wife, she and her family had been going up there for years. She always spoke incredibly highly about the both literally and figuratively rarefied air of the place. So I went up probably the first year of us dating and, to be completely candid, was very intimidated. I didn’t go to cool places for vacation. We went to lakes and then cabins without electricity. When we arrived, I just fell in love with the place. From the moment you land, especially in the metabolism with which we work on a daily basis, you feel like the weight comes off as you walk off the plane. It’s just become a refuge for us.
Did you know how many CNN personalities are on Nantucket?
I had no idea of the scale of not just CNN but the Washington presence up there. One of my first times up there, I saw Chris Matthews just sitting on the street. And I was like, “Holy cow, that’s Chris Matthews.” Then my mother-in-law told me the whole story of Tim Russert, and Luke is a buddy of mine, and all the stuff that their family has done for the island. My theory has long been—and this could be totally inaccurate—that Tim’s presence and reverence for the place was what drove a lot of people to realize how wonderful it was..
What are some of the big stories you’re looking out for this summer as they relate to the White House?
The election. You can see what’s happening in Iowa and New Hampshire. Obviously, the Republican primary is fully underway, and they’re already throwing haymakers. The president has launched his reelection campaign, intentionally rolled it out slow, and will build over the course of this year before they really hit the gas early next year. But getting an understanding of the dynamics of that, how that’s going to play out, is really going to be a pretty central focus.
You had extraordinary access to the White House, given your position. Is there something that would surprise most Americans about how this particular White House operates?
What took me a while to fully grasp is just how small the president’s inner circle is. There are really five or six people, longtime Biden World folks who have been by his side for decades. And they are everything. They have a supremely talented policy team. Obviously, the agencies as well. The talent in government is often underappreciated, as we all take the perspective of “Washington is terrible.” But the decision-makers and the people around him are a very small universe, and they are not people who like to talk to us. They are extraordinarily loyal. One of the most frustrating things, particularly for folks who covered the last administration, is they just don’t leak. They don’t talk out of turn; they don’t dime each other out. They’re not around knifing one another on a consistent basis. And which you could make the argument, and they do, that that’s probably good for the functioning of government. It’s less so for reporters covering them. But I find it to be totally fascinating and I think underappreciated as you try and work your way into that.
Do you think that inner circle, and the administration writ large, is intentional about buffering President Biden from the press and limiting his press conference moments?
The short candid answer is yes. And it’s a great frustration. It’s funny; I covered the president for a year on Capitol Hill before he became vice president. Anytime you wanted to talk to him, you could pull him aside and talk to him. Honestly, you would have to end the conversation most of the times. He was very similar as vice president as well. It is clear when he is engaging with you, when he is taking questions, that he is fully capable as somebody who’s been in this town for fifty years and has seen every policy, every political angle that you could possibly imagine. I find that when he engages with us, I have such a better understanding of what and how he’s thinking about things.
So why do they prevent him from taking questions?
I don’t necessarily want to pose this as a defense, but at least in terms of trying to understand why they do what they do, is they did this and he was elected president. They did this and his first two years were the most successful from a purely legislative agenda perspective, with the narrowest majorities in memory in probably five or six decades. And I think there is an element of if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I think that they feel like they can get around us. They use all sorts of different ways to get their message out and don’t feel like they need to necessarily work to address media concerns in a way that a traditional White House would in the past.
You’ve also traveled with the president abroad. What have you witnessed in terms of his ability to interact on that world stage that perhaps the cameras don’t catch?
His level of animation in world stage moments is just very different than it is from the regular day-to-day. He was chairman of [the] Senate Foreign Relations [Committee]; he has traveled the world for decades. He knows all of these people. Oftentimes, you can look past or you forget the scale of his experience, particularly in that space. And I think it’s very reflective when we go on trips. The trips are hard, and they’re grinding with any president. You can only imagine what that must be like for an eighty-year-old president. And I’m cognizant of that fact. I think sometimes the schedule probably reflects that to some degree. But I also think that the counter to that is, particularly when you look through the lens of Ukraine, his ability on the world stage to marshal what have been the kind of pillars of Western democracy or society over the course of the last seven decades in terms of NATO, in terms of G7, those results. And I think that that is very much a reflection of his understanding of the places that he’s going and the leaders and their domestic political dynamics oftentimes that he’s talking to. I love the trips. I loathe the lack of sleep on them, but I love them, because you just get to watch him in his element, which you don’t necessarily get to see every day in the West Wing.
How do you think he has dealt with the extreme polarity in the country, and particularly in an effort of bipartisanship?
[President Biden] made a comment during the campaign that he thought that things would start to cool. There would be a break from the former president if he won, and he would drive the temperature down a little bit. You could make the argument that that hasn’t been borne out. In large part, it’s because the former president hasn’t done what former presidents usually do, which is fade away. Obviously, he’s the leading Republican contender. The way Republicans have maintained their allegiance to the former president, particularly after January 6th, has genuinely flummoxed him. He has said that in some form or fashion. That said, one of the probably most overlooked things of his first two years in terms of those legislative accomplishments is infrastructure was bipartisan. The elements, the core pieces of that sweeping legislative agenda that he was able to enact 50 to 60 percent—the CHIPS law, which is huge, the bipartisan infrastructure law, which is huge—were all bipartisan. The spending agreements that they were able to get in those first two years, all bipartisan. And so it’s a weird, almost paradoxical context to some degree, where he’s done the things he said he was going to do on a bipartisan basis legislatively. The country has not in any way followed the path that he thought it would in terms of cooling down a little bit.
Many Democrats were split over whether Biden should run for reelection. Did you see that division on the ground level in the White House? And if so, was there an effort to whip people in line?
I heard about it from many people on Capitol Hill, especially national Democrats, state-level Democrats, too. What I think was most fascinating about it is you very rarely saw their names in print. They were very happy to give background quotes. They were terrified of putting their names in print, which is interesting to me, because Biden’s [operation] is not known as a knife-wielding, put-the-hammer-down operation. They wield their clout when they need to, but they aren’t known as making a list of everyone who says something bad and then cutting them out of everything. His team was always unequivocal. Once they had the sense that he was good with it, they were all in no matter what. That never changed. The complete lack of challengers with actual juice or people stepping out—whether big-time blue state governors or senators, or anybody with a national profile or a burgeoning national profile, everyone fell in line.
What do you think President Biden’s biggest vulnerability is in his reelection bid?
The economy probably, which again is one of those fascinating split screens of the speed of the economic recovery post-COVID, which has no precedent. I think the jobs report today again was another blowout, 300-plus thousand jobs. And unemployment’s at 3.7 percent and created 12 million jobs. All the talking points that they roll out, justifiably so, on a regular basis. And yet people feel a sense of malaise. Poll after poll after poll, people feel like the economy’s bad and that the country’s going in the wrong direction. They have grappled with this issue for years now, trying to figure out what the disconnect is, and they clearly haven’t figured it out yet. That’s just a huge issue, the general perception. The vibe of the country right now is not great.
With respect to the president, what are his vulnerabilities?
They don’t like to talk about it, but you can’t overlook the fact that he’s the oldest president in American history. And he’ll be the oldest president in American history tomorrow and the day after that. And while his folks are very insistent that it never is an issue that polls in the top three in terms of what people are making decisions on, and that maybe the actual salience of the issue itself will start to recede when he has a single Republican opponent and it becomes a contrast issue, not a one-person perception issue, he’s eighty years old and they’re still trying to figure out how navigate that reality. You cannot avoid it; you can’t walk away from it. I don’t know if it will ever be the overarching issue, but it’s unavoidable.
Looking on the other side of the aisle, former President Trump has his own hurdles. What would you say is the most problematic for him in terms of his reelection?
There isn’t actually that much that has shifted from 2020, except you add on the January 6th element. His base will always be his base. It sounds very cliche at this point, but it has the benefit of being accurate. He’s got 35 percent of the country locked in no matter what. He could do anything he wants and he’ll have 35 percent. Some days that reaches 38 to 39 percent. When you talk to Republicans who are not of the die-hard, never-waver set, people are just tired. They feel like there are good candidates out there in their primary. They would like a lot of the stuff on the policy side of things that the former president did, but just not him or his Twitter account. If he becomes the nominee, I don’t know that a majority of people will look back at the four years prior, or particularly the final couple of weeks of his administration, and think, “Yes, absolutely, that’s where I want to go back to.” I think his hurdle is overcoming that perception, and you’ve seen his campaign team actually do this. He has a much more professional operation. His team is much more buttoned down. His events are very different. The way he’s campaigning right now is very different than he did in ’16 or ’20.
You were in the Capitol on January 6th. What are your recollections from that day?
I was in the Capitol, watching the electoral count process. Our cameras were in the Senate office buildings, which are directly across the street. I got a text from a producer saying, “You need to get to the cameras. There’s some stuff going on right now.” So I walked out of the Senate Chamber to go to the camera across the street. There are underground tunnels that we use so you wouldn’t have to go through security again. I hit the elevator to go down to the first floor, and a Capitol police officer grabbed me and said, “Absolutely not. Go down to the basement.” Which is how you got over to the subway. I said, “Look, man, I’ve worked here for ten years. Don’t grab me.” Because I was apparently an idiot in the moment and had no concept of what was going on. It turned out that that was right around the time that the people had gotten into the first floor of the Senate, where the famous picture of the Capitol police officer holding them up was.
When did you discover there was an insurrection in progress?
I went down to the basement and walked over to our live cam. The camera overlooks the front of the Capitol. I walked out and opened the door. The only thing I could compare it to is that reveal scene in a sci-fi movie where the massive alien spaceship just shows up and people are like, “Oh my God, what is going on right now?” You’re watching thousands of people literally breaking into the chambers on the steps. Having covered the place and the building for so long, I would always tell my wife, “I’m in the safest place in the world.” It was just completely unfathomable and surreal. I stayed at that camera for the rest of the day, and we did live shots and reporting with technical lawmakers, many of whom had been evacuated at that point, or leadership staffers who had obviously been taken off campus to their secret offsite [location]. I stayed there until 4 a.m., when they reconvened, finished the process, and Vice President Pence announced that Biden had the electoral votes he needed.
Can you talk about the pressure of being on live television when the slightest misstep could be grounds for cancellation?
It’s an interesting question, and I say that because I don’t actually think about it all that much. I’m very cognizant of word choice. Particularly on sensitive issues, political or cultural, I’m very cognizant of how I’m going to say something and why I’m going to say it that way. At the same time, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but my view is I don’t usually wander into territory that gets people in trouble or gets people lit up on Twitter on a regular basis. I stick to what I know based on my reporting and based on the policy that I’m covering. Anything outside of that is just not relevant to why people are watching a White House live shot. It’s not relevant to what I’m saying on a panel. If other people want to get into that space, that’s great. But I have the wonderful reality of saying, “Man, I’m just a straight news guy.” And I don’t want anything beyond that.
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