Kamala Harris Torches Biden’s Defiant 2024 Run in Scathing Book Excerpt: ‘Recklessness’ Fueled by ‘Ego’

Kamala Harris has offered her most scathing assessment yet of former President Joe Biden’s fateful 2024 decision to remain in the presidential race, calling it “recklessness,” while fuming that Democrats were burdened by the then-president’s “ego” and “ambition” to back his campaign.

The former vice president-turned-2024 Democratic presidential nominee unloaded in a first-look excerpt from her forthcoming book 107 Days published in The Atlantic on Wednesday, an account of her brief campaign sprint.

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote.

She continued: “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.”

The memoir, out later this month, recounts Biden’s withdrawal from the race on July 21, 2024, just 107 days before voters went to the polls. Harris’s description, however, paints a White House locked in loyalty and paralyzed by the president’s refusal to step aside, even as public doubts over his age mounted and his campaign faltered.

Later in the excerpt, Harris goes on to insist she never questioned Biden’s competence but acknowledged the physical toll of his schedule: “At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”

She argued the fumbled debate performance against rival Donald Trump that triggered panic was the result of exhaustion, not incapacity, she added: “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. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”

Her account also underscored the fraught balance of power between the president and his vice president.

Harris wrote: “Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.”