Joe Biden plans to write a book about his presidency which ended in his historic withdrawal from the 2024 election, pushed out by senior Democrats convinced he was too old and infirm and replaced by his vice-president, Kamala Harris.
Sources close to Biden told news outlets the book could be published next year, by which time Biden will be 83 and doubtless – like other US presidents’ autobiographies – it will be a self-serving narrative lauding his time in office.
But readers have not needed to wait for an inside look at Biden’s time in power, especially his final year, which ended in his withdrawal from his re-election bid. This month saw the publication of two books containing explosive reporting on Biden’s downfall, and coming months will bring two more: so far the picture emerging is a damning one for Biden, his top aides and the Democratic party.
The books have detailed a president increasingly unfit for the task of taking on Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election and his top aides in denial about it, or actively seeking to cover it up, even as the administration warned about the existential threat Trump posed to American democracy.
Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes were first out of the gate with Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. Revelations included how Biden aides planned for his withdrawal in 2023, then when his disastrous June 2024 debate against Donald Trump supercharged calls for him to quit, “aggressively” argued that he should not, given Harris would be a “disaster”.
Then Chris Whipple, author of a book about Biden’s 2020 win, released Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Whipple’s book is slim, at just 204 double-spaced pages. But it hits hard. Ron Klain, a former White House chief of staff, describes debate preparations in which Biden seemed “out of it”, unable to “grasp … the back and forth”, and also says that after the debate disaster, Biden declined to do political work necessary to survive, preferring to enjoy the trappings of power.
Responding to Guardian reporting on Whipple’s book, Klain said he “never doubted the president’s mental acuity”, and had merely expressed concern that Biden made tactical errors, such as thinking “being a great foreign policy president was enough”.
In his interview with Whipple, Klain also describes his opposition to calls for Biden to drop out and anguish when he did so. Observers asked why Whipple did not challenge Klain on this, given his unsparing depiction of Biden’s aged state.
Biden dropped out on 21 July. That gave Harris a near-impossible task, just 107 days to put together a campaign to beat Trump. Nonetheless, Allen, Parnes and Whipple report extensive shortcomings in the vice-president’s own approach, including the flawed selection of the untested Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate, as well as infighting between Harris staffers and Biden aides who maintained campaign control.
The result was a crushing defeat, and Trump’s return to power.
Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, said Parnes, Allen and Whipple had shown Biden’s aides to be chiefly at fault: “Had Harris not had the Precision Strategies crew, think of what she could have done. I think that had she had a little more time and a little bit better advising, she could have won it.”
Reed Galen, a Republican strategist turned anti-Trump campaigner and host of The Home Front podcast, was more blunt: “Anyone who knew [about Biden’s decline] and did nothing, or knew and went to work for Kamala Harris’s campaign and didn’t let her run her own race, should never be given a position of responsibility again.”
For Biden, worse could yet be to come. In May, Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios will release the starkly titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
Announcing their book, the two reporters pointed to widespread reporting, including by Parnes, Allen and Whipple, that family members including Jill Biden and Hunter Biden, eventually pardoned by his father, persuaded Joe Biden to seek a second term.
“Biden, his family and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” Tapper and Thompson said. “What was the extent of it? Was it a cover-up? Was it a conspiracy?”
According to Politico, Original Sin is the book “Biden allies fear most”, with aides “shocked to read the ‘cover-up’ framing [which] wasn’t used explicitly in some of the interviews facilitated by Biden handlers”.
A spokesperson said Tapper and Thompson “found people post-election much more willing to talk candidly” and “interviewed more than 200 people to figure out just what went behind the scenes of the Biden White House, conducting extensive reporting and factchecking, including with former president Biden’s team”.
A fourth campaign book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey (Wall Street Journal), Tyler Pager (New York Times) and Isaac Arnsdorf (Washington Post), was said to be the only one that “involved the Biden and Harris teams in a factchecking process”. It comes out in July.
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If journalism is the first draft of history, books by journalists may just be the second. Nobody yet owns the narrative and debate will run on. Nonetheless, Jong-Fast said Allen, Parnes and Whipple had already shown Democrats were simply in “big denial” about Biden’s decline until it was too late.
“I’m not convinced that it was a huge conspiracy,” Jong-Fast said. “What the right wants is a smoking gun, a moment where a cabal got together and was like, ‘Yes, we will do this [cover-up].’ And from what I’ve read from all these books, there’s not a smoking gun, it’s just Biden got older and older, and people were in denial about it, which is a larger problem with the gerontocracy writ large.”
The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a key player in all accounts of Biden’s downfall, sits in Congress at 85. Chuck Schumer, whose role in pushing Biden out is described in another recent book, Mad House by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater of the Times, is 74 and shows no sign of quitting as Democratic leader in the Senate.
“This should be a call to action,” Jong-Fast said. “Democrats should read these books and go, ‘Oh my God, we need people to retire at normal ages and not stay on and on. You’re not an airline pilot at 85. I don’t have an 87-year-old doing eye surgery on me. That doesn’t mean you’re not worthy and wonderful and valuable. It just means that you probably shouldn’t be serving.
“If Democrats are going to run on this idea that American democracy is in trouble under Trump, then they can’t keep their friends in office for as long as they want. That’s it. Period. Paragraph.”
