2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf
In “2024,” the latest 400-page dispatch from last year’s presidential contest, the authors, a trio of veteran journalists from different august papers — Josh Dawsey (The Wall Street Journal), Tyler Pager (The New York Times) and Isaac Arnsdorf (The Washington Post) — write that “there was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it was started.”
The authors end up arguing that things were not so fated, but reading what they have to report, I couldn’t help feeling those political insiders had a point. In this account, Biden’s operation resembles its candidate: listless, semi-coherent, sleepwalking toward calamity. It exists for its own sake, impervious to outside input, pushed along by inertia alone. The Trump campaign — at least after his first indictment provides a burst of energy and purpose — appears driven, disciplined, capable of evaluating trade-offs and making tough decisions. Trump seems to want to win; Biden just wants to survive.
Things do change when Kamala Harris enters the fray. She gives Trump a run for his money, but her campaign is held back from the start by the slow-moving disaster that made it necessary in the first place.
“2024” is a well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Donald Trump announced he was running for president again — at a Mar-a-Lago launch so disorganized and halfhearted, the authors write, that even sycophantic Trump allies admitted it was “a dud.”
It is also perhaps the smelliest campaign book I can recall. Trump reflects on his future over fried shrimp and tartar sauce. A Biden aide picks at eggs and bacon in a lonely hotel restaurant. At a desultory Trump news conference in the summer of 2024, packages of sausage and gallons of milk are laid out as props to highlight rising food prices; flies circle the meat “spoiling in the August sun.”
I cannot say that I enjoyed reading this book. I often winced at the generous — at times, egregious — use of dramatic irony, and I was not terribly eager to relive the fateful twists and turns of the 2024 election, which so recently deposited us in our dismal present. But that’s hardly the authors’ fault. (It’s mine, for being a Democrat.)
Trump was interviewed for the book; Biden answered a call briefly, before his aides evidently ran interference. Harris declined. Success, it is said, has many fathers, and failure is an orphan. In “2024,” failure also has many prescient uncles who knew better, weren’t listened to and thus can’t be blamed for how the kid turned out. So it’s no surprise that elected officials — the California representative Nancy Pelosi, the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham — and aides from both campaigns go on record, or that many more provide background and anonymous swipes at their colleagues.
These conversations yield plenty of thrilling fly-on-the-wall moments: the decision-making behind Trump’s “pudding fingers” attack ad on the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis; the Democratic confab in July where the Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman “started screaming” that if he could win an election after a stroke, Biden could win his.
There are also moments of levity. We hear that when an aide delivered a message from the Democratic convention production team to the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, asking him to smile more, he replied that he’d just gotten off the phone with his wife, who called from backstage to admonish him for laughing and talking too much! (Poor Doug.) We also learn that an internal Trump strategy memo, designed with the candidate’s sensitivities (and delusions) in mind, referred to his defeat in the 2020 election as “our reported raw vote shortage.” Then there’s the story, passed along by aides, that Trump decided against offering the veep spot to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because he was, in Trump’s words, “too crazy.” (Just the right amount of crazy, it seems, to run the Department of Health and Human Services.)
The portions of the book covering the weeks after Biden’s disastrous debate, however, are not funny. I was struck by Biden’s hope that the progressives, with whom he had collaborated on domestic policy, would save his campaign. A little over a week after the debate, the authors write, Biden made a personal appeal to the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling her from his home in Wilmington, Del. A.O.C. and other progressives stuck with Biden in the days ahead as his political stock sank — apparently calculating that by buying Biden low, they could win his support for their policy goals. In “2024,” Bernie Sanders, for his part, repeatedly advises Biden to change his position on Gaza to shore up support from young Democrats.
Biden’s behavior, his savior complex and megalomania, the increasingly emphatic argument that only he could beat Trump, his inner circle’s refusal to believe unflattering data and his growing impulse to blame the media — all of it brings to mind the worst qualities of his rival. At one point, the authors report that Democratic aides, desperate to convince Biden to face the music, schemed to have the political talk show host Joe Scarborough deliver the tough love. “Staffers believed Biden would see the information if it came from ‘Morning Joe,’” the authors write, just as Trump would often defer to the hosts of programs like “Fox and Friends” over his own advisers. “In another life,” Trump apparently told Biden after the election, “we would be friends and go golfing.”
Biden even has his own stolen election fantasy. In “2024,” he repeatedly tells his allies that he could’ve beaten Trump. (The data suggests otherwise.) He’s also surrounded by unyielding loyalists. Mike Donilon — a longtime adviser who is something like Biden’s id — tells the authors that pushing Joe out “was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership.”
There was no shortage of less-than-sane decisions made in the course of the 2024 campaign. Replacing Biden with Harris doesn’t qualify. For liberal readers, “2024” is a book of what-might-have-beens. That makes for a punishing read. But if we refuse to look for lessons in this depressing book, we might just keep becoming our own worst enemies.
2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America | By Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf | Penguin Press | 400 pp. | $32
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