REVIEW: ”Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History’ by Chris Whipple
The amount of effort that went into helping Joe Biden prepare for the CNN debate on June 27, 2024, is farcical in retrospect. Hell, it was farcical at the time. The campaign built a replica of the CNN studio inside a helicopter hangar at Camp David. The set was “meticulously re-created down to the cameras, lighting, and acoustics.” Aides studied film of past debates moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in an effort to predict the questions. They arranged a Zoom call with Steven Spielberg, who “coached the president on his body language.” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood executive and Democratic megadonor, reviewed footage of Biden’s previous debates and flew in to counsel him on “how to improve his ‘physicality.'” So much for that.
Chris Whipple’s new book about the 2024 election, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, is the most recent attempt to explain how Democrats failed to stop Biden, a bumbling octogenarian who most Americans thought was too old and impaired to serve another term, from running for reelection. “Had the president’s advisers engaged in wishful thinking about his ability to overcome the effects of aging?” Whipple writes. “Or did they cover up his condition in order to stay in power?” The answer is yes.
Based on interviews with some of the key players in this national debacle, Uncharted reveals that Biden’s enablers came in many stripes. Some appear to have been genuinely deranged. One campaign aide predicted that the now infamous debate, when a bewildered Biden bragged about beating Medicare, would “quiet fears that the president was infirm.” After Biden’s performance removed all doubt as to his infirmity, senior aide Anita Dunn assessed that “it didn’t feel catastrophic at all.” The president’s closest advisers—including his wife Jill and sister Valerie—were consumed by petty grievances dating back to the 1988 Democratic primary, when Biden was forced out of the race amid (true) allegations of plagiarism and egregious lying. They envisioned a vast conspiracy involving Barack Obama, the New York Times, and others who resented “Scranton Joe” because they were jealous of his blue-collar appeal. Genuinely deranged, indeed. It’s worth noting that Jill Biden, who appears as the chief villain in another recent book about the election, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is rarely mentioned in Uncharted.
Some were keenly aware of Biden’s condition, but didn’t care. Ron Klain, the longtime Biden adviser who returned to help him prepare for the debate, was “shocked” by the president’s condition at Camp David. He was “fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged.” He wouldn’t stop babbling about NATO and how much “foreign leaders loved him.” He grew irritated when Klain suggested he should outline plans for a second term. At one point, Biden abruptly walked out to the pool and fell asleep in a lounge chair. Despite all this, and the catastrophic debate that followed, Klain was one of Biden’s staunchest defenders until the very end. On July 19, with practically the entire Democratic Party clamoring for Biden’s withdrawal, Klain called the president and “urged him to resist.” When Biden dropped out two days later, Klain was devastated. It was a “mistake,” he said, an “avoidable tragedy.” Klain is clearly one of Whipple’s main sources for the book, and the author never really tries to explain the discrepancy between Klain’s alarm at the president’s decline and his insistence that Biden keep running. It’s possible he chose to charitably omit the most obvious explanation: That Klain was among the many leading Democrats who thought the befuddled geezer was still a better choice than Kamala Harris.
There were apparently lots of Democrats who, like the vast majority of American voters, could tell that Biden was losing his marbles and (allegedly) tried to sound the alarm (in private). “For months [before the debate], Democrats had been privately telling one another that Biden should step aside,” Whipple writes. It’s a remarkable claim, one that’s been hinted at but has yet to be explored in great detail. Who are these Democrats, and what were they saying? Whipple’s failure to elaborate is frustrating, and suggests that despite all the now-it-can-be-told reporting unleashed in the aftermath of the debate (and the election), we still don’t know the full extent of the party’s failure to avert the inevitable fiasco that ensued. There are some choice quotes from Bill Daley, the former White House chief of staff under Barack Obama. He claims to have been so alarmed at Biden’s condition he started lashing out (in private) at White House staff. “This is crazy,” he told longtime Biden aide Mike Donilon, who shrugged it off. “How are they letting this fucking thing go on?” He called the White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, and begged him not to let Biden go on stage with Trump. Daley, one of a handful of sources willing to speak on the record, offers the most plausible assessment of what happened. “Everyone ignored it,” he told Whipple. “And every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.”
Whipple suggests that what Daley describes does not amount to a “cover-up.” It was simply a case of “collective denial” motivated by a “desire to stay in power,” not to mention the “hubris and thin-skinned defensiveness.” It’s hard to see the difference in this case, especially when his own reporting shows that Biden’s aides were fully aware of the president’s limitation and were actively plotting to shield him from public view. For example, he spoke to an anonymous Democratic operative who interviewed for a high-level position and was shocked by the president’s demeanor. “I was like, what is happening here?” she told Whipple. “He wasn’t asking questions. It was everyone else, not him. And it felt like they were just trying to cover up that he didn’t really know what was going on.” The campaign officials were forthcoming in their desire to rerun the “basement” strategy that had worked so well in 2020. “Part of their discussion on the strategy of the campaign was ‘Hey, in 2020 we had this great excuse of the basement, of COVID, to keep him out of the public eye. We no longer have that excuse. What do we do?'” the operative recalled. “They were saying, ‘He doesn’t have the energy. He can’t go on the campaign trail all the time. How do we fix that?'” (They couldn’t.)
Deliberately or not, Whipple implicates himself in the cover-up, or whatever you want to call it. He recalls that he first grew suspicious of Biden’s condition in September 2022, when he asked to interview the president for another book about Biden’s first two years in the White House. The interview was granted on the condition that Whipple provide the questions in advance via email so that Biden (or someone posing as the president) could answer them in writing. “It seemed clear that the president’s aides didn’t want to risk having him interact in real time with a reporter,” Whipple wrote. He recounts a fancy dinner party he attended in July 2023 in the Hamptons, the luxury beach community favored by Democratic politicians and their wealthy patrons. He only names two others guests, the elderly liberal journalists Carl Bernstein and Robert Caro, who predicted that Democratic leaders would soon “approach Joe Biden—the way Barry Goldwater and his colleagues approached Richard Nixon in 1974. And they will say, ‘Mr. President, for the good of the party and the country, we believe you should step aside.'”
One can’t shake the impression that Whipple is pulling punches. It would be nice to know who else was at that party, just like it would be nice to know the names of the Democrats telling each other Biden should step down. The answer to both questions might very well be the same. June 2023 was a very bad month for Biden on the New York fundraising circuit. Like most journalists, Whipple is a partisan Democrat. It’s hard to take him seriously at times. He lauds Kamala Harris as an “eminently qualified nominee” who “inspired a new generation” with her “fluency and authenticity.” He praises the “everyman appeal” of Tim Walz. Only a journalist could describe a Hillary Clinton speech as “electrifying.” In other words, Whipple is ill-equipped to give his party the lashing it deserves without holding back. Given how awful Democrats come across in Uncharted, one can only imagine how bad they’ll look when (or if) the full story ever gets out.
Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History
by Chris Whipple
Harper Influence, 240 pp., $32
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