It was the day after Election Night and Donald Trump’s vote share had surged ahead in key battleground states. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris was ready to concede.
But the moment was stalled when the Harris team struggled to merge her into a call with Trump.
“Aides ended up holding two phones together on speaker so that the rivals could talk,” political reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf write in their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.
Trump, then 78, reportedly joked, “Phone service isn’t what it used to be,” once connected through the speakerphone shuffle.
In a clipped, professional tone, Harris, 60, told Trump, “I’m calling to concede. It was a fair election” according to author Chris Whipple’s book Uncharted, published in April. “The peaceful transfer of power is important. It’s important to the country.”
She reportedly added, “I hope you’re president for all Americans.”
The authors of 2024 write that the vice president “had considered alluding to (Trump’s) failure to concede when things turned out the other way, but in the end she just said the country was too divided, and she hoped he would be a president for all Americans.”
Trump in turn, told her, “You’re a tough cookie,” and complimented her husband Doug Emhoff. He had called her a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock” a week earlier.
He “did not compliment her campaign, but he acknowledged she’d given him a run for his money,” the authors write. This differs slightly from Whipple’s account, which quotes Trump saying she ran a “great” campaign.
Harris’ aides reportedly described Trump—who refused to concede to Joe Biden after his loss in the 2020 presidential election—as “gracious.”
Trump also received a call from Biden, then 81, who invited him to visit the White House—a customary gesture of goodwill that Trump had famously declined when the roles were reversed four years earlier.
“In another life we would be friends and go golfing,” Trump said cheerily to Biden—just days after calling him a “stupid b—–d.”
When Pager called Biden in March, the former president reportedly bashed the start to Trump’s second term as “very negative.”
“I don’t see anything he’s done that’s been productive,” he said, while asserting that he has no regrets about dropping out of the race.
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