Former Vice President Kamala Harris writes in an upcoming memoir that the White House under President Joe Biden engaged in “recklessness” by leaving the decision on whether he should seek re-election at the age of 81 to Biden 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 recalls in an excerpt of the book that was published Wednesday by The Atlantic. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
The book, titled 107 Days, offers Harris’s most candid account yet of her strained relationship with Biden’s team and the frantic campaign that followed his late withdrawal last summer, a decision that ultimately unraveled in President Donald Trump’s election.
Harris writes that she agonized over whether she should have urged Biden not to run but ultimately concluded she was in “the worst position” to do so. “He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win,” she writes in the book, which will be released on Sept. 23 by Simon & Schuster.
While she questions the wisdom of Biden’s decision to seek another term, Harris is careful to defend his record and intellect. “Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president,” she writes. “On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
The former Vice President insists she never doubted Biden’s capacity to serve, even as questions about his age dominated Democratic circles. “I don’t believe it was incapacity,” she writes. “If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Still, Harris reserves some of her sharpest criticism for Biden’s staff, who she says consistently undercut her. The White House communications team, she writes, “rarely” defended her from Republican attacks, and often treated her political visibility as a liability.
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she writes. “None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital.”
She describes a series of moments when aides failed to back her up—including on the campaign trail when Republicans mocked her as Biden’s “border czar” after he put her in charge of studying the root causes of migration to the U.S. and amid reports of high staff turnover in her office. She also writes that the president’s advisers bristled at the attention she received when she delivered a widely praised 2024 speech in Alabama calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. “My success was important for him,” she writes. “His team didn’t get it.”
Harris’ short-lived bid for the presidency ended in defeat to Trump, who returned to the White House with 312 electoral votes. Harris won 226, far fewer than Biden’s tally four years earlier. Her memoir arrives as both Biden and Harris have kept a low profile since leaving office in January. Harris briefly weighed a run for governor of California before ruling it out in July, leaving open the possibility of another presidential campaign in 2028.
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