2024 book review: Trump, Biden, Harris and a turbulent election full of what-ifs

The Guardian

2 days ago

Donald Trump is on a roll. The 'big, beautiful bill' is law. Ice, his paramilitary immigration force, rivals foreign armies for size and funding. Democrats stand demoralized and divided. 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, is a book for these times: aptly named, deeply sourced.
Kamala Harris declined to speak. Joe Biden criticized his successor in a brief phone call, then balked. Trump talked, of course.
'If that didn't happen … I think I would've won, but it might have been a little bit closer,' he says of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which set the race alight.
Yet 2024 is about more than the horse race. It also chronicles how the elites unintentionally made Trump's restoration possible, despite a torrent of criminal charges against him, 34 resulting in convictions, and civil lawsuits that saw him fined hundreds of millions of dollars.
'Trump always drew his strength from decades of pent-up frustration with the American democratic system's failures to address the hardships and problems the people experienced in their daily lives,' Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf write.
'In 2024, [Trump's] supporters saw institutions stacked against them … leading them to identify viscerally with his legal ordeal, even though they had not experienced anything like it before.'
Dawsey is a Pulitzer prize winner, working political investigations and enterprise for the Wall Street Journal. Pager covers the White House for the New York Times. Arnsdorf was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the assassination attempt.
Dawsey and Pager are Post alumni. With Arnsdorf, they capture the aspirations and delusions of Trump and the pretenders to his Republican throne, of Biden and Harris too.
'In the weeks after the election, Biden repeatedly told allies that he could have won if he'd stayed in the race,' 2024 reports, 'even as he publicly questioned whether he could have served another four years.'
Really? Biden's approval rating fell below 50% in August 2021 and never recovered. From October 2023, he trailed Trump. A year out, the authors reveal, Barack Obama warned his former vice-president's staff: 'Your campaign is a mess.'
Biden's aides privately derided Obama as 'a prick'.
'They thought he and his inner circle had constantly disrespected and mistreated Biden, despite his loyal service as vice-president.'
As for Harris, Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf report that she 'knew that the race would be close, but she really thought she would win'.
Despite that, David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, admitted post-election that internal polls never showed her leading.
'I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,' he said. Harris's debate win never moved the needle.
Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf contend that the outcome was not foreordained. Rather, they raise a series of plausible-enough 'what-ifs'. One is: 'If the Democrats got clobbered, as expected, in the 2022 midterms, and Joe Biden never ran for re-election.'
Except, by early 2022, according to This Shall Not Pass, a campaign book published that year, Biden saw himself as a cross between FDR and Obama.
A telephone conversation between Biden and Abigail Spanberger, a moderate congresswoman now the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, captures Biden's self-perception.
'This is President Roosevelt,' Biden begins, before thanking Spanberger for her sense of humor.
She replies: 'I'm glad you have a sense of humor, Mr President.'
Back to 2024. Biden bristled at being challenged. Pushback risked being equated with disloyalty. His closest advisers were either family members or dependent on him for their livelihoods. He lacked social peers with incomes and personages of their own.
Mike Donilon, a longtime aide, tells the authors: 'It was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership to have forced Biden out.
'Tell me why you walked away from a guy with 81m votes … A native of [swing-state] Pennsylvania. Why do that?'
Because Biden's debate performance was a gobsmacking disaster. He also found navigating the stairs of Air Force One difficult and needed prompts to find the podium. In May 2025, Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer – a disclosure that came after 2024 went to press.
The authors of 2024 pose Republican hypotheticals too. One: 'If Trump never got indicted, or if Republicans didn't respond by rallying to him, or if the prosecutions were more successful.'
Ron DeSantis, Florida's governor, demonstrated a lack of nerve. Glaringly, he failed to use the initial E Jean Carroll trial, over the writer's allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her, to bolster his presidential ambitions. DeSantis didn't dispatch his wife, Casey DeSantis, to Manhattan to offer daily thoughts and prayers for the plaintiff, or for Melania Trump. If you want to be the man, first you've got to beat the man.
Another hypothetical: 'If Trump and Biden didn't agree to an early debate …'
That question hangs over everything.
Trump's pronouncements leave Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf anxious. After the 2022 midterms, he mused about terminating the constitution. Later, on the campaign trail, he spoke openly of being a 'dictator for a day'. When he was back in the West Wing, reporters asked: 'Are you a dictator on day one?' 'No,' he replied. 'I can't imagine even being called that.'
Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf then catalog Trump's unilateral actions on that first day, including stripping political opponents of security clearances. Later that month, he commenced his vendetta against law firms he deemed to be enemies. In February, Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press pool unless the news agency referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the 'Gulf of America'.
2024 contains no mention of Hungary's Viktor Orbán. Perhaps it should have made space. Hungary's leader is an autocrat in all but name, an elected leader who has removed freedoms regardless. Republicans adore him.
2024 is published in the US by Penguin Random House