After the 2024 Presidential Campaign, the Books

Debra Saunders on Apr 4, 2025

WASHINGTON -- Former President Joe Biden is a bitter man whose ambition outstripped his abilities while Vice President Kamala Harris was unusually loyal. Those are two of my takeaways from the 2024 campaign autopsy book "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

By comparison, the drama that journalists had expected from President Donald Trump and a campaign smoothly run by Susie Wiles was minor.

The new book offers newsy nuggets about Biden's downward spiral, which nobody could deny after the June 27 Biden-Trump debate.

I open such books with trepidation. Allen and Parnes rely on anonymous sources' "exclusively 'on background'" remarks of Biden and Trump aides who want to make their enemies look ridiculous and themselves as voices of reason.

If they insisted on keeping their reporting on-the-record, Allen told me, "We don't think anybody would be honest with us."

And the tightly written account I read rang true.

"Fight" is not an expose about the tangled finances of the Bidens or Trumps. It's a story about their campaigns and the political pros who directed them.

Democrats had to contend with Biden's overweening ambition -- as he clung to power in spite of sagging poll numbers and Beltway discontent. But then they picked Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary, and his "meh" pick for running mate inspired even less confidence than Biden. Harris was Biden's none-too-secret weapon.

When Biden finally bowed to pressure and withdrew from the race on July 21, he endorsed Harris, but only after insisting that there be "no daylight" between her and his presidency. How did that work out? Not well.

Harris was reluctant to talk to the press and underwhelming when she did so.

As Allen told me, he saw Harris' missteps as "political sin" -- that is, failure to plan and act strategically -- while Biden's decision to stay in the race past his due date was a "moral failing."

Many Democrats never will forgive Biden for delivering victory to Trump.

Other prominent characters in "Fight" include former President Barack Obama, who had washed his hands of Biden even though Obama's the guy who stoked Biden's unbridled sense of political skill by choosing the then-Delaware senator to be his running mate in 2008. Obama wasn't crazy about Harris, either.

To her credit, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to save Biden from himself.

Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was so unseasoned he had never flown in a private plane before.

Trump can't like the fact that he's a minor character in the book. But after four years in political exile, he was the happy warrior.

Harris claimed she worked at a McDonald's but had no evidence to back it up. Trump gleefully served up fries under the Golden Arches. Biden dissed Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, saying, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters." Team Trump called in a garbage truck.

Sure, there were people problems -- short-term 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer -- within Team Trump, as Allen and Parnes report, but not at the top.

For the most part, Trump was disciplined, and it paid off. What's more, Trump enjoyed a suite of superior policies that appealed to voters.

In the end, to the surprise of many, it was Biden's moral sins, not Trump's, that doomed his candidacy. It was a wild ride.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

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