UNCHARTED: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple
Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 2024, President Joe Biden hosted the traditional gathering of Irish and Irish American politicians in the White House. This was home ground for Biden, the most ostentatiously Irish figure ever to occupy the Oval Office. He should have been able to schmooze his way through it on autopilot. Yet he had to use a teleprompter for his remarks. Even in the friendliest and least stressful of public environments, he could not risk the possibility of losing track of what he was saying.
In his lively, engaging but sometimes frustrating chronicle of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Chris Whipple records the incredulity of one of those at the gathering, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Bill Daley: “If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? ‘How are they letting this thing go on?’ he thought. ‘This is crazy.’” Elsewhere in Whipple’s narrative, Daley expresses his anger at those around Biden in rather more earthy terms: “Every freaking one of them had no balls.”
Whipple’s previous book, “The Fight of His Life” (2023), is a sympathetic account of Biden’s first two years in office, written with the obvious cooperation of his inner circle. It is thus unsurprising that “Uncharted” is most vivid when recreating the drama of the president’s stubborn refusal to realize that he was in no condition to stand against Donald Trump last November. Yet this strength also underlines the book’s limitations: It never quite manages to answer Daley’s question. How did they let this thing go on?
The tragedy for America — and for the world — is not that the Democratic Party was deluded about what was at stake in the 2024 race. It is that it was all too cleareyed in its perception of what a triumphant return for Trump would mean for democracy in America. Admittedly, this did not require any great foresight; Trump’s first term had given ample warning of the looming disaster of a second coming emboldened by absolute impunity and embittered by a thirst for vengeance.
This awareness brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s line: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” For anyone who is outside the MAGA bubble, the first and best half of Whipple’s book is a voyage into the unforgivable. He shows in vibrant detail that some of Biden’s closest advisers were in little doubt about the heavy toll old age had taken on his capacity to perform as president in 2024, let alone to convince voters that he was in fine shape to do so until 2029. They persisted regardless in feeding his delusions until, as it turned out, it was too late to stop Trump. History will not be kind to them.
But Whipple himself is perhaps too kind. The problem with all insider accounts is that they depend on the insiders. One of Whipple’s main sources is Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who often comes across in the book as an appalled observer. Whipple opens his story in June 2024 with the preparations at Camp David for Biden’s televised live debate with Trump. Klain was the head of the debate prep team, and we see these events largely through his “startled” eyes. Biden “didn’t know what Trump had been saying and couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was,” Klain recalled. When Biden ran through a mock debate, Klain found that “he didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation. … He didn’t really understand what his proposals had been. And he had nothing to say about a second term other than to finish the job.” The real debate was, of course, little different — except that millions of Americans could now see in real time what Biden’s intimate associates had been concealing from them for many months.
All of which might lead the reader to expect that the story surely must continue with Klain’s anguished attempts to get Biden to stand aside before it is too late. Such a reader might then be confused that there is a second Ron Klain in Whipple’s narrative, the one who as late as mid-July is urging Biden to stand firm. This second Klain is apparently devastated when he gets the news from his successor as chief of staff, Jeff Zients, that Biden has decided not to run after all: “For Klain, this was a gut punch. ‘Jeff, that’s too bad,’ he replied. ‘I think that’s a mistake.’” Whipple never brings the guy who sees Biden as “fatigued, befuddled and disengaged” into contact with the doppelgänger who keeps urging Biden to hang tough.
Whipple’s primary source on the Trump side is, albeit for different reasons, no less problematic: Paul Manafort, a convicted criminal who holds the considerable distinction of being one of the sleaziest characters in contemporary Republican politics. And while the book rattles briskly through Kamala Harris’s failed attempts to overcome the handicap of having so little time to present herself as an alternative to both Trump and Biden, it has few great revelations to impart. Its real meat lies in what Klain accurately calls “an avoidable tragedy” — and Whipple never sinks his teeth as fully as he might into those who let it unfold.
UNCHARTED: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History | By Fintan O’Toole | Harper Influence | 230 pp. | $32
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