“Everywhere I look, there’s a ‘West Wing’ episode apparently relevant to whatever the news is that day,” he says over the phone, a few days after meeting in person in what felt like a different life, dominated by the assassination attempt against Donald Trump and the fallout from Biden’s abysmal debate performance.
“But one thing someone on that text thread said is that Aaron Sorkin could never have thought this one up,” Schiff says. “This is beyond what we were capable of imagining.”
Actually, Sorkin, who created “The West Wing,” did attempt to imagine an alternate plotline. Sunday morning, he’d published an op-ed in the New York Times proposing that Democrats make a radical move and nominate Republican Mitt Romney (R-Utah) at the convention. Then when the Biden news broke, he reversed tack, in an email posted on X by Joshua Malina, who’d played deputy communications director Will Bailey on the series. “I take it all back,” Sorkin wrote. “Harris for America!”
“I’m stumped by why he would write that [Times piece], and it’s certainly not anything I agree with, but we’re all capable of mind blips,” Schiff says.
Personally, though, Schiff was a mess of emotions. “I was shocked and at the same time excited, and so sad for the President, who I’ve had a relationship with,” he says, adding, “I do think he fits the ‘West Wing’ profile of someone who wants to leave the world a better place.”
Schiff is an independent, but he’s almost always voted blue and has attended every Democratic National Convention since 2000. “The West Wing” was an instantaneous hit when it debuted in October 1999 toward the end of the Clinton administration, and immediately embraced by Washington, with politicians clamoring to hobnob with their fictional counterparts and Democrats clinging to this depiction of their ideal White House during the George W. Bush years. He’s already planning a trip to the Democratic National Convention in August and may go with friends from the “West Wing” cast.
Schiff says he tends to “cringe” when actors talk about politics; he only agreed to this interview after the urging of a mutual friend. But he’s also embraced the idea that if you’re one of the people who gets put in the spotlight, for whatever reason, that’s an opportunity to shine it on someone more deserving.
He says he didn’t cringe, though, when George Clooney wrote his editorial calling for Biden to drop out of the race — “I often don’t cringe when people who devote their lives to activism speak out,” he says. “I only cringe when actors says stupid things, like I’m probably saying right now.”
Despite his protestations, Schiff does have political relevance. Every day, he hears from idealists in Washington who say they were inspired to start their careers because of “The West Wing,” as new generations have found the show on Netflix and now Max.
He’s agreed to be part of a podcast series in which actors read short stories imagining a world profoundly altered by the rights and freedoms the conservative blueprint Project 2025 proposes stripping away. And he’s already been on Zoom calls conscripting him to head to Michigan and Wisconsin, and, presumably, be on the campaign trail for Harris and down-ballot Democrats all the way through November.
The last time Schiff was in the White House was May, accompanying his stepfather, the 93 year-old civil rights attorney Clarence B. Jones, who helped Martin Luther King draft his “I Have a Dream” speech, as President Biden gave Jones the Medal of Freedom.
Growing up in New York, Schiff, 69, was in the streets protesting the Vietnam War as a teenager, and on the dais, at 13, when students took over Columbia University. He was, he believes, the only White person at the first Black Panther meeting in New York, taken there by civil rights lawyer Flo Kennedy, who was a friend of the family. “That was my influence,” he says. “Mainstream politics seemed ridiculous to me” — especially when Watergate broke just as he earned the right to vote.
He’d worked in theater on and off in his 20s but didn’t get into acting seriously until he was 31, after a string of blue-collar jobs, including driving a taxi, laying cable and cleaning Greyhound buses on the night shift at the Port Authority. Then “The West Wing” happened. D.C. opened its arms to the cast, the writers, the consultants, Sorkin. He found himself in Congress lobbying for unions, which was easy, since he’d been a member of “seven or eight.”
Everyone in politics wanted to talk to him about politics, and cared about his opinion — which was pretty informed since he was spending all his time learning the inner workings of the White House and how to craft messaging from consultants including Lawrence O’Donnell (a former Senate aide), former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers and pollsters Patrick Caddell and Frank Luntz. “I got indoctrinated into the mainstream through the show,” says Schiff, who now spends part of the year living in Montana with his wife, actress Sheila Kelley, talking with neighbors who have MAGA signs on their lawns.
He’s since campaigned for Al Gore and Barack Obama, and went to every battleground state with Hillary Clinton in 2016 — he was at the Javits Center when she lost.
Biden is the one politician he’s had a true relationship with, though. They first met just before Biden gave a not-so-great speech at the 2004 convention. And then after a debate in Charleston in July 2007, through Luntz, he met Biden again. They had pizza and Cokes at a Courtyard Inn and Biden asked the actor to come to Iowa in the middle of winter with him.
Schiff thought Biden was personable, had integrity and needed his help. Plus, he felt Biden’s presence in the race kept Clinton and Obama honest. The actor would pile into one of two SUVs containing Biden, his wife, Jill, sons Beau and Hunter and a few staff members, and they’d show up to a Pizza Hut or library. He spent four or five days in the cold with them, and was ready to head to New Hampshire and South Carolina, before Biden came in fifth and dropped out. “I think I was the only one of us that knew he had no chance,” Schiff says.
Maybe that idealism is why his exit from this race took so long. “But I never felt the arrogance or narcissism people were accusing him of,” Schiff says. “What I got from him was just enthusiasm.”
In the weeks since the debate, certain story arcs of “The West Wing” have been brought up again and again.
Notably, an assassination attempt and a presidential health crisis in which President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) revealed that he had multiple sclerosis and had been hiding his health issues from the American public in an election year. Bartlet ended up staying in the race, killing it at a debate and winning in a landslide. It wasn’t meant to be a moral victory, Schiff says.
“We love how Martin portrayed it, but I think Aaron Sorkin saw this as a real problem of not following the fundamental requirements of governance, such as transparency,” Schiff says. “Without transparency, you’re withholding information and you’re betraying your staff and it’s just the tip-top of the iceberg.”
But the episode Schiff has been thinking of most in recent days is Season 1’s “A Proportional Response.” In the episode, President Bartlet learned that his personal physician had been killed on a U.S. military transport that got shot down by Syrian terrorists. Bartlet’s immediate reaction was utter destruction. “I will blow them off the face of the earth with the fury of God’s own thunder,” he says, calmly, without a moment’s hesitation.
What came next, though, was a high-wire dance, in which Bartlet’s staff and military advisers tried to talk him down. As the public, Schiff says, we see the speech only at the end of that process. In other words, we don’t know what happened in this very personal stretch for Biden, beyond news reports that Schiff doesn’t believe tell the whole story. We don’t know what happened in the Harris household, except that Ella Emhoff was organizing her knitting studio “before my Sunday became extremely not chill,” as she put it on Instagram.
That episode showed the humanity of the president, and how important it is to have advisers who are willing to speak the truth in uncomfortable and dangerous situations. “And all of those things, we know, will not exist in a Trump presidency and did not exist in the last one,” says Schiff.
The choice over the next few months, Schiff says, is really what kind of television show we want to be living in.
“If we’re a combination of ‘West Wing’ and ‘Veep,’ I think we’ll survive,” he says. “If we’re a combination of ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Veep,’ then we won’t.”
