‘They decided I should be knocked down a little bit more’: Biden-Harris tension boils over

Kamala Harris is finally unloading on Joe Biden and his administration.

The former vice president slammed Biden’s decision to run for reelection and claimed his White House undermined her bid for the presidency in newly-published excerpts of her forthcoming book, ripping open wounds that have roiled the Democratic Party since her dramatic loss last November.

Harris’ criticism of Biden’s decision-making — and sharp critiques for the advisers that surrounded him — laid bare frustrations that the Biden White House had dismissed and downplayed during his term: that Harris felt sidelined throughout the administration. She wrote that Biden’s staff saddled her with difficult policy items. She claimed they castigated her after delivering a speech that went viral. And she accused them of showing little interest in defending her against attacks from Republicans and conservative-leaning media.

And Harris wrote that she and others around the president should have pushed him to step aside sooner, especially considering his age.

“’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote in an excerpt from her book published by The Atlantic Wednesday morning. “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.”

But Harris argued as Biden’s potential successor, she was in the worst possible position to advise him on dropping out. Challenging the then-president’s decision, she wrote, would have come off as “incredibly self-serving.”
“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 said.

Biden ended his bid for reelection in July 2024, just 28 days after a disastrous debate performance touched off a public reckoning in the Democratic Party, and led to calls from even the party’s most influential officials imploring him not to run.

“At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” she wrote. “I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser.”

“107 Days” — Harris’ new memoir — is an account of the frenetic months following Biden’s eventual call to drop his reelection bid all the way up to President Donald Trump’s victory in the November election. The book will be released Sept. 23. A spokesperson for Biden reached by POLITICO did not immediately provide a comment in response to the Harris excerpt.

The Harris campaign spent $1.5 billion in the 15 weeks leading up to election day. She crisscrossed the country, energizing Democrats and looking to make inroads with moderates and conservative-leaning voters disaffected by Trump. But when it was all over, Harris won just 226 electoral votes, a crushing performance that fell well short of Biden’s 306 electoral votes four years earlier.

Others within Biden’s administration are also considering, or are already, writing books. POLITICO previously reported that Steve Ricchetti, the former president’s longtime adviser, is weighing writing one about his time in politics. Biden’s former secretary of state, Antony Blinken, already has a book dealabout the international crises during his years as the nation’s top diplomat. Biden’s former press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, also has a forthcoming book due out in October about her time in the White House.

Harris’ book, though, will likely be a must-read given her position in the administration and as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. In the excerpt, she also described a communications shop that she said failed to come to her defense in response to attacks from Republicans and conservative media. She said she faced an unprecedented amount of media scrutiny for a vice president — and suggested that aides close to the president were unhappy with that dynamic.

“When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” she wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”

She added that she learned Biden’s staff “was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” including about staff turnover at the vice president’s office.

When the White House added “irregular migration” to her policy portfolio, Harris wrote that she helped secure billions in private investment for Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as part of an administration push to defray the root causes of immigration from the region. She detailed meetings with leaders and activist groups and touted the creation of 70,000 jobs due to American investment.

But when she looked to publicize the success, “White House staff stalled,” Harris wrote.

“Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike,” she said.

Biden’s team, Harris wrote, also “didn’t like the contrast that was emerging” when polls indicated she was becoming more popular with voters as the then-president slipped back.

When she called for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza in a Selma, Alabama, speech marking the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in March 2024, Harris said she was “castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.”

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she wrote. “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.”

An earlier version misspelled Steve Ricchetti’s last name.