Former president Joe Biden has been litigating his place in the history books since he was forced out of the 2024 presidential race.
His latest effort is “Promise Me, America,” a memoir out Tuesday in which he makes a fuller case for his record and offers his account of the political crisis that ended his bid for a second term.
The Washington Post obtained a copy in advance.
In the book, Biden, who turns 84 next week, defends his decision to seek a second term as doubts about his age and stamina came to dominate the campaign. He looks back on the coronavirus pandemic that shaped the opening of his presidency, as well as efforts to contain the effects of conflicts in Ukraine and Israel. He also returns again and again to Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in 2020 and who regained power four years later.
The memoir may be Biden’s most forceful attempt to buttress his record, as he confronts declining health. On Sunday, Biden announced that his treatment for Stage 4 prostate cancer would prevent him from promoting his memoir as vigorously as other presidents have done with theirs.
“In the daily grind of the White House, it could be difficult to step back and take the long view — because so much was happening every minute,” he writes. “But now, from my lake house, I am able to slow down and savor the results of my presidency.”
Here are the key takeaways from the memoir:
Biden still isn’t over the effort to push him out
Biden expresses no regret about his decision to seek a second term. Instead, the former president is both stridently defensive of his decision and openly frustrated with the Democratic effort that pushed him to end his campaign in 2024.
“Today there is no shortage of people who think I blindly raced to run again. Driven by ambition. Selfishness. Unaware of the concerns about my age,” he writes, arguing that he knew how old he was but thought he was capable of doing the job. “I felt an obligation to run. … And I believed Donald Trump was a threat to the nation and I was the best person to beat him.”
No decision looms over Biden’s tenure more than this one. It put him on a path to his disastrous debate against Trump in June 2024 — “It didn’t feel right from the start,” Biden writes of his performance — and his decision that July to end his campaign and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Biden makes clear that he believes the bench of Democrats who could have succeeded him is “strong and full of talented and ambitious people.” But, he argues, he did not think that anyone “was a stronger candidate than me, or had a better chance of winning in 2024.”
“You can dismiss that assessment if you want. But I know the process I went through. I made a thoughtful, careful, rigorous judgment,” he writes.
Biden recalls knowing the moment he got off the debate stage that it had gone poorly. “Not good,” his longtime aide Ron Klain told him as they left. He recounts how many past incumbents had bad first debates, and how he took comfort in the fact that many bounced back in their second clash.
“I was wrong,” Biden writes. “This wasn’t just the first debate, it was my last one.”
Biden holds grudges against fellow Democrats
Biden remains frustrated with the Democratic leaders who helped push him to end his campaign. He writes about how the weeks following the debate were spent trying to allay concerns about his age and talking with party leaders about the future of his campaign.
“Virtually every conversation I had with leaders was the same,” he writes, recounting how they praised his presidency, warned he may lose to Trump and then added that they would respect his decision. “In reality, the only decision they would respect would be my decision to exit the race.”
He directs particular frustration at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who played a central role in ushering Biden out. Biden writes that Pelosi publicly “was still saying it was my decision to make” but privately was “working furiously behind the scenes to get elected officials and Biden delegates to defect,” and that the former House speaker told him there were no polls that said he could win. He also recalls Schumer visiting him in Delaware and telling him he was certain to lose.
“I have to admit it was personally hard to take so many old friends turning on me. I told Schumer he had a lot of gumption (I may have said it differently at the time), coming to my home and telling me to get out of the race,” Biden writes. “Loyalty matters to me. If I give you my word, I stick with you. If I say I’m with you, I’m with you to the end.”
Biden writes that he mended his relationship with Pelosi over lunch at an Italian restaurant in 2026.
“We didn’t discuss that episode. But we had been through too much together to allow a rift to go un-mended,” he writes.
He describes no similar mending with Schumer, though he notes the then-Senate majority leader was among his calls after he ended his reelection campaign.
Biden writes he carries Gaza deaths with him, likens Netanyahu to Trump
Biden writes that he will “never regret standing by Israel in the wake” of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but acknowledges that his efforts to “restrain the Israelis” fell short. He carries the deaths of innocent Palestinians with him, he writes.
“Too many innocent Palestinians were killed. Too much pain was inflicted on people with no connection to Hamas. Too little food and water and medicine and fuel got into Gaza for too long,” Biden writes. “And I carry that with me. It was a tragedy.”
The former president is sharply critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, writing that he has “Trump-like tendencies,” including playing “fast and loose with the truth” and “bending democratic institutions to serve his personal needs.”
The issue cleaved the Democratic Party in 2024, with many fuming at the death toll in Gaza and pro-Israeli groups’ role in American politics. Harris’s hand in the administration’s response was one of the most persistent problems she faced while running against Trump.
Biden warns that American leaders who share his decades-long commitment to Israel could become a thing of the past. “I hope Israel wakes up,” he writes. “The days of American leaders like me — passionate defenders of Israel to the core — are passing.”
Trump is a major character in Biden’s memoir
Biden opens his memoir on Jan. 6, 2021, essentially making the final days of Trump’s first term the starting point of his own presidency. He casts his years in office as an effort to repair the damage he believed Trump had done, beginning with the attack on the Capitol and the transfer of power Trump tried to stop.
Trump is a recurring character in Biden’s book — many times as an antagonist, sometimes as a confounding presence.
He accuses Trump of fomenting an insurrection, then hiding in the White House as his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol: “If the president wouldn’t address the nation, the president-elect would.”
He faults Trump for his fumbling of the pandemic and for the acerbic language that he says has divided the country. But he also says that Trump could be gracious, and he prints the letter Trump left for him at the White House in full.
“It was almost as if there were two Donald Trumps,” he wrote. “Here he was, offering his best wishes in warm language that sounded like it was coming from an old friend.”
Covid shadows every corner of Biden’s presidency
When Biden arrived in office, the nation was in the depths of the covid-19 pandemic. The virus upended White House operations and how he communicated with the public, Biden writes; ultimately he relied on an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for events and announcements. He also began keeping a running tally of covid deaths on a card in his lapel pocket.
Biden says he was shocked that Trump had not done more to roll out covid vaccines, prompting him to announce a new goal: administer 100 million shots of the vaccine in his first 100 days.
“I was told by the press and others that this would be impossible,” Biden writes. In actuality, the president was setting expectations low; Trump’s team had set out similar goals, The Washington Post previously reported. Biden ended up blowing past his original goal, with 220 million shots administered in his first 100 days, helping reduce the threat of the virus for many Americans.
Biden says that his covid fears shaped his economic policies, his work with global leaders and even his desire to invest in infrastructure.
“If we couldn’t get vital supplies like medicine and masks to people who needed them, we were exposing ourselves to new dangers,” he writes. He would go on to work with Congress to pass a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.
Three years later, Biden was laid low by the virus as he deliberated whether to end his bid for reelection.
“After I’d led the country out of COVID, it was a cruel irony to be knocked back by the virus at such a critical moment in the campaign,” he writes.
Biden’s memoir is a reflection of his own mortality, down to the title
The title of Biden’s memoir is a nod to his late son, Beau Biden, who, while battling brain cancer, made his father promise him he would be all right no matter what happened.
The moment, a talisman for Biden after Beau’s death in 2015, was a son nearing death imploring a father to keep moving forward. And this memoir, down to the title, is intended as an ailing Biden doing the same for the nation.
Biden was diagnosed in 2025 with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that spread to his bones. “I have to say, when I heard the diagnosis, it hit me hard,” he writes. “It’s one thing to imagine how hearing the word ‘cancer’ will upend your world. It’s another thing to actually hear it.”
And while Biden writes that he is “feeling good,” he announced this month that he would scale back the planned interviews and events around the memoir’s release.
The memoir is light on forward-looking advice — “a memoir is more about the past than the future,” Biden writes. But near the end of the book, Biden essentially asks America to make a promise to him.
“It will surely take time; it may be the work of a generation or more. But we are not condemned to lives of blind acceptance,” he writes. “We can reject efforts to define us and divide us by our differences. I believe in the young people I met throughout my four years in office. And I take heart from the knowledge that we have been in dark places before.”
The book ends with this from the former president: “Until I’m counted out for the last time, I’ll keep getting up. And America will too.”
The post Biden defends his 2024 run and reckons with Trump in his new memoir appeared first on Washington Post.
