Former Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a stunning attack on Joe Biden in her upcoming memoir, where she blamed the former president and his team for her landslide loss in 2024 presidential election.
Harris blasted Biden’s decision to run for re-election as “recklessness” driven by personal ego and said his White House staff deliberately sabotaged her, which is the only reason she believes she lost to President Donald Trump.
The explosive revelations from Harris’s book “107 Days” were published Wednesday by The Atlantic, showing the failed presidential candidate is pointing the finger and directly blaming the Biden administration for her failure.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” Harris wrote about Biden’s re-election attempt. “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.”
Harris said that Democratic Party leaders should have been more aggressive in pushing Biden out of the race and supporting her, instead of repeating what she calls their hypnotized mantra.
“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris complained in the memoir about her failed 2024 campaign.
The former vice president also claimed Biden’s staff actively worked against her, and said she was viewed as a threat rather than an asset to the president.
“When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging,” Harris writes. “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. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.”
“His team didn’t get it,” Harris said.
Biden’s communications operation refused to defend her against attacks, Harris claimed, and instead added fuel to negative narratives about her performance.
“When I was attacked on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé,” Harris complains.
“They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” she complains.
“Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” and specifically mentions the “border czar” controversy as an example of the White House failing to support her.
“When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” she writes. “Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike.”
“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” she said.
However, Harris still maintains in public that the 81-year-old president was mentally capable throughout his term.
“Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president,” Harris writes.
“On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired,” she said. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. 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.”
Harris continued to complain that it was other peoples job to force Biden out of the 2024 election and to open a path for her, and they failed.
“And 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,” she said.
The memoir excerpt focuses on July 24, 2024, when Biden finally delivered his Oval Office address announcing his exit from the presidential race. Even that came with disappointment for Harris.
“It was almost nine minutes into the 11-minute address before he mentioned me,” Harris recalls.
Harris’s loyalty during the campaign proved costly when she appeared on “The View” and was asked what she would have done differently than Biden during his presidency.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said during the disastrous October interview. That comment haunted her campaign through the final weeks as Trump’s team successfully used it to tied Harris to the failed Biden-era policies that voters quickly rejected.
Harris acknowledged in the memoir that her loyalty to Biden became “an anchor to her presidential campaign” and showed “timidity about taking on Biden and his record.”
The book “107 Days” is set to be released in two weeks. Harris announced over the summer she would not run for California governor next year but has left the door open to another presidential run, though multiple sources close to her told CNN they expect her time running for office may be done.
This isn’t the first time Harris has blasted Biden unexpectedly, of course. Who could forget when she accused Biden of racism during the 2020 Democratic primary before she was named his running mate?
Take a look —