Former Vice President Kamala Harris writes in an excerpt from her memoir that President Joe Biden "got tired" as he entered his 80s but rejects the notion of a coordinated effort inside the White House to conceal mental or physical decline.
The passage, published by The Atlantic as an excerpt from Harris's upcoming book "107 Days," describes her view of Biden as experienced and capable even on difficult days, while acknowledging that age began to show in "physical and verbal stumbles." Harris wrote that "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."
Harris said she did not believe Biden was incapacitated and that she would have reported such a conclusion if she had reached it. She pointed to a high-profile debate performance that she called a "debacle" and said it came after back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a fundraiser, implying exhaustion as a factor in the misstep. "I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so," Harris wrote. "As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country."
The memoir excerpt also details Harris's frustrations with how she was treated within the Biden-Harris administration. She complained that White House staff did not provide the level of support she considered necessary for the vice presidency on issues ranging from foreign policy to immigration. Harris said Democrats should have been more assertive in persuading Biden not to run for reelection in 2024 and called the decision to leave that choice largely to him "reckless." "It’s Joe and Jill’s decision,' 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," she wrote.
Harris's account frames her reflections in two registers: personal experience as vice president and a broader assessment of the Democratic Party's choices ahead of the 2024 election. She criticizes party leaders for deferring to Biden's personal judgment about running and says the stakes were too high to make that a purely individual decision.
The excerpt continues Harris's public reckoning with her tenure in the White House and her subsequent 2024 presidential campaign, offering behind-the-scenes observations about relationships inside the administration. She wrote that many people wanted to "spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity," and countered that this was not her lived truth.
The full book, titled "107 Days," recounts Harris's experience running for president and continues to be promoted ahead of its publication. The Atlantic published the excerpt ahead of the book's release, providing the most detailed public account to date of Harris's perspectives on Biden's final year in office and the internal dynamics that shaped Democratic strategy for the 2024 cycle.