Former Vice President Kamala Harris is speaking her truth on the “recklessness” of Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
In her new memoir, Harris speaks candidly about the Democrats’ failed 2024 campaign, which ended with her losing the presidential race to Donald Trump. An excerpt from her forthcoming book, 107 Days, describes Biden’s decision to run as a “personal decision” made by him and his wife.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes in her book. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
Harris continued. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego or ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
The surprising reveal highlights the division between the Biden administration and the debate over Biden’s decision to seek a second term amid concerns about his age. In hindsight, Harris says she believes she should have spoken out.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running?” she wrote. “Perhaps.”
Before Biden dropped out of the race, Harris wrote that she feared he might see her advice to withdraw as “naked ambition” or even “poisonous disloyalty.” She also criticized his age, saying, “At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
“I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she added. “If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
The memoir also details Harris’ struggles with Biden’s associates, whom she feels contributed to the “constant attention” on her vice presidency.
“And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” Harris wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
She also criticized the administration for failing to defend her against right-wing attacks over her handling of migration at the southern border, a responsibility Biden had assigned to her.
“When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” Harris wrote.
The former Vice President also took issue with how the administration “rarely pushed back with my actual résumé” when conservatives attacked her “on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire.'”
According to the former California Senator, she “often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me.” And despite the White House having a large communications team
, Harris said, “getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”Biden has not commented on the revelations from Harris’s memoir, set to be released later this month.
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