107 days, p.1
107 Days, page 1
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To my team. From the beginning, and through the joy, pain, and personal sacrifice, you left it all on the field. I am forever grateful.
The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
—ALBERTO BRANDOLINI
I got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA
….
I was born like this.
—KENDRICK LAMAR, “DNA”
JULY 21 107 Days to the Election
“Auntie! Auntie!”
A small fist rapped gently on my bedroom door.
I rolled over and reached for my phone. Amara had kept to our deal. It was exactly 7:30 a.m., and my grandniece had waited patiently to wake me at the agreed hour for our promised Sunday pancakes.
I’d flown in late the night before from a campaign event of a thousand people at a packed hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Organizers had made a huge-lettered, rainbow-colored sign, VPTOWN, for my event, but there was both energy and tension in the crowd. Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, three weeks earlier, had thrown the campaign into chaos, and I’d had to fend off supporters’ anxious questions.
I threw on sweatpants and an old Howard University sweatshirt and pulled up my hair in a ponytail. I’d promised bacon and sausage with the pancakes, but before that I needed my half hour on the elliptical.
I’d stopped watching the Sunday-morning shows: no more endless rhetoric about the president’s capability. I turned on the cooking channel. The chef was making an elaborate dessert, which captivated Amara, eight, and her sister, Leela, six.
The girls had spent the week with me at the vice president’s residence—the sprawling Queen Anne–style house on the grounds of Washington’s Naval Observatory. They’d be leaving that afternoon, heading back to Palo Alto, California, ahead of the new school year. After breakfast and a wash of greasy hands, we sat on the rug by the coffee table to do a big jigsaw puzzle together while their mom, my niece, and their dad went upstairs to pack.
And that’s where I was when my secure phone rang, at eleven minutes past one.
I glanced at the screen. Caller ID blocked. Only about a dozen people had my secure number. Of those few, only one came up blocked. I unfolded my legs, stood up, and walked around the corner to my office.
“Hi, Joe,” I said.
“I need to talk to you.” He was calling from his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he’d gone to isolate after testing positive for Covid four days earlier. His voice sounded hoarse, exhausted. “I’ve decided I’m dropping out.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’m going to announce in a few minutes.”
“Why today?”
“It’s the only thing anyone is talking about. And it’s too much. There’s going to be another letter from Democratic members of Congress on Monday. It’s too much.”
Really? Give me a bit more time. The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall.
I put the phone on mute and went back to Amara and Leela. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised, voice urgent: “Go get your parents!”
My husband, Doug, was in Los Angeles, trapped by the global CrowdStrike software glitch that had grounded many flights. My sister, Maya, was in New York. I needed to start alerting the family before this story broke.
The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation.
That would be ruinous, and I said so.
“Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What we do, right now, is so important,” I said. “People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this. Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time. Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks.”
The public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage. I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.
Joe’s two closest aides, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, were in the room with him in Rehoboth. He put Ricchetti on the phone. “We were always going to support you. We just want to do this announcement first and leave a little bit of time.”
“Steve, you know that’s not going to work,” I said. “There needs to be no daylight between the announcements.”
“That’s a fair point,” Steve conceded. He gave the phone back to the president.
Joe said, “Let me call you back.”
I waited, hoping I’d convinced them to avoid more turmoil and speculation. He’d resisted this decision for weeks, adamantly ignoring a drumbeat that had ranged from solicitous advice to intense condemnation.
Amid all that cacophony, Joe had said nothing to me about this, until July 15. It was two days after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump. We were in the Situation Room, at a briefing on the investigation into the shooting. Joe was at the head of the table, as always. I sat to his right. As the meeting concluded, the president thanked everyone and rose to leave. I’m a stickler for protocol, as I believe everyone at the White House should be. I sit only after the president sits, stand when he stands. As everyone else began to file out, Joe turned to me. “Do you have a minute, can you stay?”
Soon we were alone, dwarfed by the long table at which so many momentous decisions had been made. The screens on the walls had all gone dark, except for the red digital clocks showing the time in current conflict zones.
“If for any reason I had to drop out, I would support you, but only if that’s what you want. It’s occurred to me I haven’t asked you.” He’d clearly rehearsed this speech, it wasn’t a spontaneous thought, and it was the first time I knew he was seriously considering it.
The calls for him to drop out, he said, would probably continue. People were throwing his own words back at him, that he had said he would be a transitional leader.
“I’m fully behind you, Joe,” I told him. “But if you decide not to run, I’m ready. And I would give it all I’ve got, because Trump has to be beaten.”
There had been no follow-up discussion. In our relationship, it was common for him to test out ideas on me, and until he decided, I had no reason to believe it would actually happen. All his public statements remained defiant declarations that only “the Lord Almighty” could make him drop out. Then he came down with Covid.
But still, no word. As nearly a week passed, I had come to accept the inevitability that he was staying in the race, that the time for him to make a different decision had passed.
Now here he was, on the phone, telling me otherwise.
JULY 27 131 Days to the Election
As soon as he walked onto the debate stage in Atlanta, I could see he wasn’t right. He’d had neuropathy in his feet for years. Then he’d fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs. His doctor had prescribed a boot, but he was too stubborn to wear it, and I’m positive that screwed up his gait. Now he walked unsteadily, trying to balance himself with robotically moving hands.
He’d called me a couple of days earlier from Camp David, where he was in the middle of debate prep. It was late afternoon, and I’d been working from home in Los Angeles. I pulled up a chair overlooking our backyard.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“It’s going. It’s okay.” He sounded downbeat and extremely tired. He didn’t mention that he was coming down with a cold.
“Are you getting some rest? You need to take a break, you know.”
Debate camp is awful. They break you to make you. They prod at all your missteps, all your weaknesses; find holes in your arguments; savage your delivery. It leaves you feeling barely competent. From there, they build you back up, running through every possible line of attack until you feel invulnerable. With the debate fast approaching, Joe should have been in that second phase. By the time he made that call to me, he should have been more upbeat. But he didn’t sound that way, and it worried me.
I reminded him about the tactics we’d previously discussed in dealing with Trump: alternate brushing him off like lint on your shoulder or striking back aggressively. His voice lightened as he recalled how his mother had once promised him a quarter if he went back and punched the bully who’d been picking on him. He did, and she gave him fifty cents. Telling the story seemed to put him in better spirits, so I wished him luck and, trying to buck him up, told him he was going to kill it. I hung up feeling sorry for him. I knew he didn’t want to do this debate, and it seemed like he just needed to talk to someone who would understand what it feels like, what it would take.
Within the campaign, there’d been a whole debate about whether he should debate. Joe had seemed reluctant from the start. Jill didn’t seem to think he should, either. Trump’s refusal to debate during his party’s primary had cleared a plausible path for avoiding it. Nancy Pelosi, for one, argued that Biden didn’t need to lower the dignity of the presidency by appearing onstage with a convicted felon who’d tried to subvert the last election. But some of his most trusted advisers were insistent that this would be the split-screen moment he needed. The campaign was stuck, fighting with Trump for the same limited pool of disengaged or undecided voters.
Doubts about Biden’s age and capacity had been fueled by the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur on his retention of classified documents. Hur had concluded that he couldn’t get a conviction because a jury would perceive Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report had detailed concerning lapses. I knew very well that when he was tired, his age showed, and I also knew that depositions can be grueling. And this one began October 8, the morning after Hamas had viciously attacked Israel, when Biden had spent long hours in classified meetings, monitoring the crisis. He would have had the weight of those events, still very much in flux and threatening regional war, on his mind. Trump’s ravings had been getting progressively crazier as the campaign went on. If Biden had lost a step, Trump had, too.
Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, another of Joe’s senior advisers, had become convinced a debate at this relatively early stage could change the trajectory of the campaign. (And so it did, just not in the way they had anticipated.) These decisions were being made by his inner team, and in the end, I had to accept that they had convinced themselves that Biden could do this.
In 2012, after Barack Obama had flubbed his first debate against Mitt Romney, Biden, as vice president, had trounced Paul Ryan so badly that Sarah Palin said it reminded her of a musk ox running across the tundra with someone underfoot. The nation had just watched Biden deliver a stirring State of the Union address. Donilon and Dunn insisted that the president could do at least as well as he had against Trump in 2020.
I’d been campaigning on the West Coast in the days just before the debate—doing Spanish language press and outreach in Arizona, meeting major fundraisers in California, and attending gatherings with Black influencers in Los Angeles. That morning I’d met with the R&B superstar Usher to solidify his support on our common interest: unlocking credit for minority businesses. Then I’d taped a segment for the BET Awards, discussing issues from voting rights to abortion rights with the actress Taraji P. Henson, who gave an impassioned plea at the awards ceremony for awareness about the damaging contents of Project 2025.
In the evening, I gathered with just three of my staff to watch the debate in an overchilled conference room at the Fairmont hotel in Century City, Los Angeles. Other staffers watched in a room next door. They’d set up a tiny plate of crudités. I ordered pizza for everyone: it was going to be a long night. After the debate, I’d do a quick rallying call for campaign staff and volunteers across the country, followed by four television interviews back-to-back, immediately after Biden walked off the debate stage in Atlanta. The networks had a studio set up, ready for those live hits.
I knew there’d be something to clean up. There is always some small misstatement of fact or gaffe of some kind. Every debate has them. But because of that call from Camp David, I had a gnawing feeling about the night.
That’s why the people in the room with me were the ones I trusted most. I knew I could be completely frank with them as the debate progressed. Brian Fallon, one of my senior advisers, was a seasoned media hand known for not pulling punches. While running a nonprofit dedicated to reforming the way judges are appointed, he’d given his former boss, Chuck Schumer, a C rating. Brian had concluded, earlier than most political operatives, that Trump was different in kind, not just degree. This was not business as usual—Trump was not an ordinary politician; MAGA was not a typical party. He brought a fighter’s mentality to the job.
Sheila Nix, my campaign chief of staff, had come to DC from law school to work at a law firm, been recruited to help with Senator Bob Kerrey’s presidential campaign, and loved every minute. Since then, she’d toggled between campaign work and issue-driven jobs, like working for Bono on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. She’d also worked as Jill Biden’s chief of staff, so she had good relations with the Biden team.
The third person in the room was my director of comms, Kirsten Allen, a veteran of tight races and high-pressure situations. I’d spotted her in 2018, working for Andrew Gillum, when he lost the Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis by a hair, in one of the closest gubernatorial races in history. She’d been my press secretary and special assistant to Joe Biden, and had been our national press secretary for the Covid response.
Jake Tapper’s first question, predictably, was on the economy. Biden answered in a thready voice, rushing through his answer. There was no light in his eyes, no expression in his voice. They’ve loaded him up with too many stats, I thought, as he blurted out numbers. The first question is always difficult. He needs to warm up. He’ll settle down; he’ll get on top of it.
The next question was on the military. He’s got so much material on this—Trump calling our fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” He managed to get off that line but had stepped on it earlier by saying no one had died in wars overseas on his watch, seeming to forget the thirteen marines who died in the bomb blast at the airport during the evacuation of Afghanistan. I’d been on Air Force Two when it happened, and we had to change our flight plan to get back to DC in the face of that tragedy. How could he overlook that day? I know his deep feelings for those men and women. It’s personal to him.
Trump, meanwhile, was using his words like a weapon, but shooting before he aimed, spouting lies, unburdened by the truth. Biden, striving for accuracy, often stopped midsentence to correct himself, which left him sounding hesitant and garbled. I knew the important policy points he was struggling to convey, and I knew he knew them. He is a master of this material, but that was not coming across at all.
And then, at the end of a string of convoluted sentences in which he twice confused millions and billions, Joe lost his train of thought entirely, looked disoriented, and blurted out, “We finally beat Medicare.”
Trump’s reply: “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”
As the ninety minutes ground on, my staffers watched with one eye on the big screen, the other on the small screens in their hands. They were tracking reactions on social media: “Disaster.” “Train wreck.” “Embarrassment.” Kirsten and Sheila were texting each other: Are other people seeing what we’re seeing? Is it as bad as we think?
Doug, at a watch party with Hollywood donors, was getting an earful. Rob Reiner had screamed at him: “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy and it’s your fault!”
During the final commercial break, I went to another room to quickly get makeup and hair touched up. Brian handed me the talking points the campaign had prepped. I glanced down at them.
“JOE BIDEN WON”—all caps, highlighted. “He fought through his cold as he is fighting for the American people.”
Are you kidding me?
I threw the paper back on the table. Then Michael Tyler, Biden’s campaign communications director, called from Atlanta with a similar account of what they expected me to say.
No. Don’t feed me bullshit. Everyone saw what they saw.
I couldn’t help but think of the Richard Pryor joke where his wife catches him in bed with another woman. “You gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes?” he says.
I was not about to tell the American people that their eyes had lied. I would not jeopardize my own credibility. This night had turned into a disaster, and I was fully aware of the importance of what I was to say. How we handled this, right now, would have a long-term political effect, not just for him but for me. I had to acknowledge what people saw and then try to give them a way to make sense of it.
