With Opponents Like These, Who Needs Elections?
The most recent book about last year's election—2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf—depicts a Veep-like carnival of incompetence starring an erratic and vindictive egomaniac whose worst impulses were enabled by a cadre of fiercely loyal dolts and lackeys who grew increasingly detached from reality, not to mention an entire political party and partisan media apparatus that dared not question the mercurial madman lest they be exiled, humiliated, branded as traitors to the cause.
It also covers the Trump campaign.
2024 is light on juicy new details about the attempted cover-up of Joe Biden's decline. Weirdly enough, the most explosive revelations are about Iran's efforts to murder Donald Trump and his associates. The authors briefly note how U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran had "multiple kill teams" inside the country and was unable to rule out an Iranian role in the assassination attempts in Pennsylvania and Florida. (Don't tell Tucker Carlson.) Several pages later, they devote three sentences to the breaking news that former secretary of state Mike Pompeo "narrowly escaped" after Iranian operatives "tried to capture him" at a Paris hotel in 2022. Um, what?
In any event, the book is no less damning an indictment of the Democratic Party compared with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin or other counterparts in the genre. It is in many ways more devastating, more grimly amusing, and deeply ironic thanks to the authors' deadpan portrayal of a bumbling president, preposterously running for reelection at age 81, who exhibits every major character flaw Democrats have ever ascribed to Donald Trump. They describe a campaign that deserved to lose—even, or perhaps especially, after Biden's rickety ass was finally booted from the ticket to make way for Kamala Harris.
The entire election can be summed up by how each of the key players chose to cooperate for the book. Trump agreed to be interviewed. Harris declined, obviously. Biden's aides refused on his behalf, citing a conflict with his upcoming memoir. Then one of the authors reached Biden on his cell phone as he was about to board an Amtrak train, and they spoke for several minutes. His aides went ballistic and blocked the reporter's number on Biden's phone, which was subsequently disconnected.
The book is packed with small moments like these that exquisitely capture the essence of the Biden, Harris, and Trump campaigns, and their respective vibes. Biden and his team were determined to run again because they believed he "governed well, and they cared that historians agreed, ranking Biden among the most successful modern presidents." They found a token minority, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, to serve as campaign manager, but gave her essentially no power. Biden got expert advice from Hollywood producers who proposed "an aggressive media campaign to restore voters' confidence," but no one had a clue what he should say.
After Trump was almost killed, and the entire world saw him bloodied and triumphant, looking more badass than any politician has ever looked, Biden's cadre of "uniformly subservient" advisers thought Biden would benefit because it presented an opportunity to "appear presidential" by "speaking loftily about the values and virtues of American democracy." Alas, no one cared. Even after dropping out, Biden continued to insist he was a "political asset" and "complained that Harris's campaign wasn't deploying him enough." Biden's right-hand man, Tom Donilon, told the authors he still thinks the Democratic freakout after the infamous debate was "an act of insanity."
Harris, meanwhile, is revealed as a breathtakingly inept politician incapable of taking action in a timely manner. The new campaign obsessed over the most irrelevant details. Her philandering husband, Doug Emhoff, received multiple scoldings during the convention for laughing too much and, alternatively, for not smiling enough. They "spent weeks agonizing" over just about every decision, including how to respond to a Washington Free Beacon report casting doubt on her alleged employment at McDonald's, which remains very much in doubt to this day.
The authors recount this episode as if to imply that the Free Beacon was onto something. Making the candidate's sister (and alleged McDonald's coworker) Maya Harris available for a softball interview in a lifestyle magazine was deemed "too risky." News that a more respectable media outlet than the Free Beacon was investigating the matter caused "alarm" within the campaign, so they did nothing and let Trump steal the spotlight once again with an amazing photo op. "When Harris saw the video of Trump working the deep fryer, she told aides he was doing it wrong," the authors write. "An aide suggested she could point that out in an interview, but she never did."
The former VP is at her most impressive in the 24 hours after Biden delivered the news that he was dropping out and planned to endorse her, working the phones with ruthless proficiency to lock up the nomination and advance her career. Once tasked with actually running a campaign, it became clear she had no business running a McDonald's, let alone the United States government. Her political instincts were almost as bad as her ability to speak unscripted. At one point, before the switchover, Harris earnestly proposed showcasing Biden's accomplishments at the convention with "an original song by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda." It was rejected in part because Miranda was viewed as too closely associated with Barack Obama, whom many in Biden's circle regarded as a "prick."
The Trump campaign, by comparison, was a juggernaut of wisdom, discipline, and professionalism. They understood the electorate and devised a clear strategy to target the voters most likely to help them win. They spoke the language of the common man. As one Trump adviser said of primary challenger Ron DeSantis: "Nobody wants to vote for the guy who is a weird nerd loser." The Harris campaign, by contrast, spent weeks devising a Trump attack that came to be known as "the three 'Uns': Unhinged. Unchecked. Unstable." Riveting stuff.
The Harris campaign had a "chief analytics officer." Trump had a 22-year-old known as "TikTok Jack" and advisers who understood the brilliance of having Trump hold a press conference in the passenger seat of a campaign-branded garbage truck. Harris aides built a replica debate set and wore bronzer to impersonate Trump during prep sessions like exuberant theater dorks. Trump aides pelted reporters with snowballs like normal Americans.
Republicans had their own erratic candidate, as well as plenty of clownish toadies jockeying for influence and generally behaving like a bunch of middle school girls, but ultimately Trump proved easier to manage than his opponents. This was thanks in no small part to campaign boss Susie Wiles, who ruled with an iron fist and frequently talked the candidate out of shooting himself in the foot. There's no doubt that Wiles, the first female White House chief of staff in history, would be a national celebrity if she were a Democrat.
Wiles helped Trump navigate an episode in the book that highlights the differences between the parties. Throughout the campaign, Trump refused to bow to the demands of anti-abortion activists who favored a national ban after the demise of Roe v. Wade. He thought it would be political suicide, and he wanted to win the election. "I have to find a way out of this issue," Trump told a pro-life activist. "It's killing us." The Democratic position on transgender issues polls even worse than a national abortion ban, yet the party appears determined to die on that hill.
There's another moment toward the end that underscores the problem Democrats have created for themselves. Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, the embodiment of the Democratic establishment, runs into Trump adviser Chris LaCivita at a New Year's Eve party. They took a selfie together as McAuliffe congratulated his rival. "What a campaign you guys ran," he said. McAuliffe wasn't wrong, but Democrats spent the last several years telling their voters that Trump would end democracy and revive the Third Reich. Now they're dismayed to learn their constituents are telling them "there needs to be" Democrats "willing to get shot" fighting fascism.
Who's excited for 2028?
2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America
by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf
Penguin Press, 416 pp., $32
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