In an excerpt from his memoirs published Wednesday by the magazine The AtlanticKamala Harris said it was a “recklessness” allowing Biden to run for a second term as president.
Harris admitted that they drill, then 81 years old, “tired” and was prone to give stumbling blocks of his age.
He accused the White House staff for not supporting her, and even sometimes for actively hindering her work as vice president.
“It is Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said it, like a mantra, as if we had all been hypnotized. Was it grace or recklessness?”
“In retrospect, I think it was reckless,” Harris says in the first extract of his book 107 days.
And it emphasizes: “What was at stake was simply too big. This was not an election that should have left the ego of an individual, to the ambition of an individual. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Biden surprised abandoning the race in July 2024 after a disastrous debate with Trump that caused questions about his mental capacity.
Harris denied that there had been some conspiracy to hide the condition of Biden, but said it was evident that there were problems related to his age.
“On his worst day, he had a deeper knowledge, he was more capable of exercising judgment and much more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best day,” he wrote.
“But at 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age was evidenced in physical and verbal stumbling,” he says.
“When the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s most intimate circle seemed to be well with that. In fact, it seemed as if they decided that I should be crushed a little more,” Harris wrote.
Harris lost against Trump after the shortest presidential campaign in the modern history of the United States: those 107 days that give title to their memoirs.
