Former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized President Joe Biden’s White House for leaving the question of his 2024 re‑election to Biden and his wife, calling the approach “recklessness,” and said the administration’s communications team “rarely” defended her, according to excerpts of her upcoming memoir published Wednesday.
In the passage, Harris recounts that the decision to let Biden and Jill Biden decide “wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition,” and that team members treated the matter as if they had been “hypnotized” into repeating the refrain, “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” The memoir, titled 107 Days, is due Sept. 23 from Simon & Schuster. The excerpt appeared in The Atlantic.
Harris writes that she agonized over whether she should have urged Biden not to run but concluded she was “in the worst position” to do so, worrying her intervention would be perceived as naked ambition or disloyalty. She described the campaign that followed Biden’s late withdrawal last summer as frantic and said that sequence of events ultimately culminated in the return of former President Donald Trump to the White House.
While sharply questioning the wisdom of leaving the re‑election decision to Biden and his inner circle, Harris defended his record and faculties. “Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president,” she wrote. “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. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”
Harris said she never believed Biden was incapacitated and that, had she believed otherwise, she would have said so. “As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country,” she wrote.
Her sharpest criticism is reserved for Biden’s aides, whom she says repeatedly undercut her and failed to shield her from Republican attacks. Harris wrote that the White House communications team viewed her public visibility as a liability, operating on a “zero‑sum” premise that if she rose, the president dimmed. “None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well,” she wrote. She described instances in which aides did not defend her when Republicans mocked her as Biden’s “border czar,” a label tied to her assignment to study root causes of migration to the United States, and recounted reports of high staff turnover in her office.
Harris also said that advisers bristled when she received attention for a widely praised 2024 speech in Alabama calling for a ceasefire in the Israel‑Gaza war, arguing that her success should have been viewed as politically beneficial to the president.
Her own 2024 presidential campaign, she writes, was short‑lived and ended with a loss to Trump. Harris received 226 electoral votes to Trump’s 312, a margin far below President Biden’s total four years earlier. Since leaving office in January, both Biden and Harris have kept low public profiles. Harris briefly considered a bid for governor of California before ruling it out in July and left open the possibility of a 2028 presidential run.
107 Days arrives amid continuing scrutiny of the Biden administration’s final years and the dynamics between Biden and his vice president. The memoir offers the most candid account yet from Harris of a strained relationship with the president’s team and of the internal debates that surrounded the decision to seek another term at an advanced age.