Former Vice President Kamala Harris revealed in her forthcoming book that then-President Joe Biden left her “angry and disappointed” after a phone call just before she faced Donald Trump in a nationally televised debate, as reported [1] by The New York Post.
The details are included in Harris’ memoir, 107 Days, scheduled for release on Sept. 23. According to excerpts published by the Guardian, Harris said Biden phoned her while she was preparing for the only debate of her short-lived presidential campaign.
Harris recalled that Biden told her, “My brother called. He’s been talking to a group of real power brokers in Philly.” He then asked if she knew certain individuals his brother mentioned, but she did not.
“His brother had told him that those guys were not going to support me because I’d been saying bad things about him. He wasn’t inclined to believe it, he claimed, but he thought I should know in case my team had been encouraging me to put daylight between the two of us,” Harris wrote.
The former president then shifted to his own debate experiences, a move Harris said left her unsettled before taking the stage against Trump.
“I was angry and disappointed.”
Harris said Biden “was distracting me with worry about hostile power-brokers in the biggest city of the most important state.”
Harris noted that her husband, then-second gentleman Doug Emhoff, recognized her unease at the time and told her to “let it go” before the debate.
Although Harris largely refrained from criticizing Biden publicly during her campaign, the memoir offers new insight into the tensions between them as she stepped into the Democratic nomination race.
In another excerpt, published by The Atlantic, Harris reflected on the lead-up to the 2024 election. She said that the phrase, “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,” had become a common refrain among Democrats, but she ultimately viewed it differently.
“We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high,” Harris wrote.
Harris also disclosed that her initial preference for a running mate was then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, not Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
She explained that she decided against selecting Buttigieg, saying the campaign was “already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.”
The memoir has already generated attention ahead of its release and is expected to add further discussion about Democratic leadership decisions during the 2024 election cycle.