After the shock of the Trump's victory in the 2016 election, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. The authors covered the campaign primarily through "background" interviews and a commitment to wait until after the election to go in print. Now that Trump has done it again, so have the authors. Their latest account is Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (Harper Collins, 2025).
Fight focuses on the story as it played out in the aftermath of the disastrous Biden-Trump debate in June 2024. The first - and by far most interesting part of the book - covers what, for lack of a better word, can be called the coup that removed Biden from the top of the Democratic ticket. Clearly the authors think that Biden decisively damaged Democrats' chances, first, by irresponsibly deciding to run for a second term, and, then, by resisting removal from the ticket for weeks following the debate debacle. The book highlights the intra-party conflicts that led to Biden's stepping aside, especially the role of Democratic heavyweights like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, whose personal relationships with Biden deteriorated dramatically as a result. The book also highlights the role of money in American presidential campaigns, the decisive significance ascribed to the way donors's money started to dry up in the aftermath of Biden's poor debate performance. Fight illustrates how Kamala Harris deftly and successfully moved quickly to win the nomination (despite opposition from Pelosi and Obama), but was unable ever really to overcome the factors working against her chances of winning, not least the widespread impression that she never articulated very well her reason for running. The book highlights how Harris successfully maneuvered Biden into endorsing her, but also suggests that Biden's endorsement also reflected his resentment of Obama, who had supported Clinton over Biden in 2016.
The book does not neglect the Trump campaign, but its beginning point precludes coverage of Trump's re-ascent from his post-January 6 nadir. We get coverage of the political maneuvering within the Trump campaign, how well the Trump campaign was actually managed, the assassination attempt and its effects on the campaign, the selection of J.D. Vance as Trump's running mate, and, of course, Trump's effective outreach to low-propensity voters and use of new social media. Obviously, these are important and interesting topics. But overwhelmingly, at least to this reader, what this book highlights most is the Biden-Harris story, and the "gaslighting" that the authors believe best describes the Democratic party's 2024 story - "gaslighting," first, about Biden's apparent decline, and, "gaslighting," then, about the prospects for Harris to win. As someone who had come to believe, by the end of the campaign, that Harris had a realistic chance of winning, I really appreciated the convincing way the authors demonstrate how very poor her chances really were.
This "gaslighting" theme inevitably highlights how dysfunctional the Democratic party's leadership became in 2024. "Democrats tried to break Donald Trump. Instead, they shattered again. They said they were saving the country the presidency, and the Congress from Trump and his MAGA movement. They saved nothing, not even themselves. Democrats lost everything, including their friendships."
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