The Most Eye-Popping Parts of Kamala Harris’s New Memoir—So Far

In the first excerpt of her forthcoming book, former Vice President Kamala Harris takes former President Joe Biden and his inner circle to task.Saul Loeb/dpa/ZUMA

Kamala Harris is back…with a vengeance.

The first excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, 107 Days^[2], about her history-making presidential campaign^[3] after President Joe Biden dropped out^[4], published^[5] on Wednesday morning in The Atlantic. And it is unexpectedly juicy for Harris, who is typically known to equivocate—and who, until now, staunchly defended Biden’s decision to run for a second term.

In the excerpt, Harris repeatedly takes Biden and unnamed members of his “inner circle” to task, for what she alleges was their distrust of her ambitions; their failure to support her, and acknowledge her successes, as vice president; and their resistance to her growing popularity as Biden’s declined. “Their thinking was zero-sum,” she writes of Biden’s closest confidantes. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.” (The Biden camp does not yet appear to have commented.)

Below are some of the juiciest topics she tackles.

Biden’s decision to run for president again

For the first time, Harris publicly admits that she should have considered telling Biden not to run for a second term:

During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.

Later, she characterizes administration officials as being “hypnotized” and reckless for failing to push Biden to drop out earlier, even as outside pressure was mounting^[6]:

“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. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.

Biden’s age

Harris rejects the “narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity,” but concedes that he had gotten “tired”:

Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. 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.

Relationship with the White House

A vast portion of the excerpt features Harris’s complaints about deep-seated distrust she alleges Biden’s staff harbored towards her:

Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to prove my loyalty, time and time again.

When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans.

Later, she describes her frustrations with the White House communications team and their failure to adequately fight back against her bad press:

They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.

[…]

Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my first year…the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove exhausting.

[…]

And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.

One example she references: The criticisms over her work tackling the root causes of migration^[7] from the Northern Triangle of Central America:

When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved.

[…]

Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time.

No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.

Harris also writes that Biden’s inner circle resented her growing popularity:

When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn’t like the contrast that was emerging.

As one example, she refers to a speech she gave^[8] on “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” in Selma, Alabama in March 2024:

It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.

Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.

That’s the last line of the excerpt. It ends abruptly—almost as abruptly as democracy as we know it seems to have ended the day Trump was sworn into his second term.

But it’s almost certain that we can expect more tea spillage when the book publishes, on Sept. 23.