Elections are won but also, often more dramatically, lost. The losers need little reminding of this. They also know, or learn soon enough, that no two elections are exactly alike, and that refighting the last one seldom yields victory next time.
But for journalists, raking over defeat offers abundant rewards, especially when it comes to presidential campaigns. So much fresh material, so many bruised egos, so many scores to settle, so many I-told-you-so’s — a full chorus of second-guessing from discarded policy advisers, unheeded tacticians, unhappy money “bundlers.” Every one of them saw the wreck coming, of course, in the instant the train lurched out of the station, but no one would listen. Now, at long last, they can tell it all.
No good reporter turns this down. And the price is cheap — nothing more than the simple promise of anonymity plus a kind reference or pulled punch when the uncited source surfaces in the story. Two current masters of the genre are the veteran team of Jonathan Allen, of NBC News, and Amie Parnes, of the Hill, who bring the zeal of Dylanologists to their poking through campaign detritus. In one of their previous books, “Shattered,” the foredoomed loser was Hillary Clinton, blamed for everything from her flat-sounding speeches to her subordinates’ infighting. In their new book, “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” there are two loser-chumps to beat up on, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, which also means twice as much refuse. And the co-authors have dug up every clammy rind.
From the opening scene, in which Nancy Pelosi settles uneasily in front of the TV in her apartment (described, within the space of three sentences, as both “posh Washington crash pad” and “seven-figure Georgetown condo”) to watch Biden’s calamitous debate with Donald Trump — which she had “urged” him to avoid, naturally — we know where the story is going.
By Page 10, Biden’s staunchest defender in the Senate, his Delaware successor Chris Coons, “a lead member of the cleanup crew” who must apply pressure to wobbly colleagues after the debate, knows the task will be even grimmer than usual: “While senators pissing their pants was nothing new,” the authors write “they were right that the president had shit the bed.”
Were those Coons’s words. Who knows? Who cares? In the 21st century, politicians and their stenographers all sound alike and use the same coarse patois, a sort of dumbed-down post-“Veep” speak. Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t just stuck with thankless assignments. She “was given a shit-sandwich portfolio stocked with issues, like illegal border crossings, that the president couldn’t solve.”
The gamy diction seems meant to capture raw emotion and impulse, glorified in these pages as thought. “Many of our sources told us what they were thinking or shared what someone else said about his or her own thinking,” the authors explain. And in some cases, “we received documents that shed light on what someone was thinking.”
And how often that thinking takes the form of disparagement. Even worse than the hapless Biden is the “polarizing” campaign strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon, who, when she was passed from the president to Harris, brought with her “a well-earned reputation for kissing up, kicking down, and freezing out — how she treated superiors, dissenting subordinates, and people she perceived as rivals for power, respectively.”
Did she also freeze out Allen and Parnes? The question always haunts gossip-laden books of this kind. It has been almost 30 years since Joan Didion noticed that political journalism owes its methods and sensibility to police-blotter reporting, with one crucial difference: In crime journalism, “the story told by a criminal or civil informant is understood to be colored by self-interest” and “the informant knows that his or her testimony will be unrespected, even reviled, subjected to rigorous examination and often rejection”; in the notionally more elevated political report, the gabby insider “knows that his or her testimony will be not only respected but burnished into the inside story.”
And it is the promise of the inside story that has made “Fight” so hotly anticipated. Already it is being scoured and word-searched, read — or rather skimmed — for “scooplets,” as one of my former bosses at the New York Times, Jill Abramson, used to call these minutiae. Politico, announcing the new onslaught of book-length postmortems, described them not as the usual exercises in wound-licking or blame-apportioning but as nothing less than “the race to shape Joe Biden’s legacy.” But since when, exactly, was any presidential legacy arrived at so speedily? They used to grow or diminish over the course of decades or longer, shaped not by reporters on deadline but by long-term consequences and unforeseen and unknowable events.
We now have what Allen and Parnes refer to as the “horse-race perspective” — the only perspective worthy of their attention. Up-to-the-minute profanity notwithstanding, theirs is the most airless of cloisters, a political world in which there are only winners and losers. A book purporting to tell us something fresh and new about a historic election, in which some presumably major issues were at stake, instead gives us the same stale morsels as our internet news feeds.
“Poll” and “polling” appear in “Fight” a combined 125 times, “message” and “messaging” more than 80, and Gaza just seven, all seven paired with a reference to losses: the losses not of life and dignity, or of hope for an enduring peace, but of lost votes; votes of Jews squandered after Biden’s vulgar epithet for Benjamin Netanyahu “made the rounds”; votes of 13 percent of Democrats in the Michigan primary whose “uncommitted” ballots “proved embarrassing” to Biden.
Most Americans seemed well aware of how consequential the 2024 election was. There was a time when journalists would have been relied on to do so too, no matter how quickly they were working. The 1968 election season, which included the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and violent protests in the cities where the parties held their nominating conventions, resulted in three classics: Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Joe McGinniss’s “The Selling of the President” and Garry Wills’s “Nixon Agonistes” — as well as the third volume in Theodore H. White’s great Making of the President series. Each of these books included fresh reporting, but each also rose above it. The author’s subject, in every case, was the country itself, its people divided over a costly war, crime waves in its cities, a loudening roar of “forgotten Americans” in the heartlands, communities struggling to balance economic health and social justice, changing sexual mores, rampant drug use — all of these matters are familiar, because all are still with us.
But there is scarcely a word about any of it in “Fight.” There’s next to nothing on issues that were important in 2024 and are even more relevant and urgent now. This holds for the winners as well as the losers. The only reference to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is as a failed Harris talking point, even though passages in a key recent guidance from the Defense Department are a “word-for-word facsimile” of a Heritage paper published a year ago. Elon Musk flits through as an oddball, smoking pot with the podcaster Joe Rogan. Stephen Miller, by most accounts the dominant policy-oriented brain in the current administration — plainly the case in the Signal chat incident about Yemen — shows up as little more than a name.
Donald Trump is not so much discussed as coronated: In the authors’ formula he is the deserving winner, the valiant warrior who endured two impeachments, “four indictments, a conviction, a contested 2024 Republican primary, two assassination attempts, and a general election fight against the Democratic tag team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris” and now, bloody but unbowed, stands on the threshold of being granted “a second chance to implement his America First agenda.”
For wisdom they turn to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who told a journalist that her boss would reconquer Washington as a remade leader, chastened and wise, “more knowledgeable about how to interact with the media.” In addition, Wiles added, “his personnel instincts are, I think, better honed.”
Trump’s nemesis Liz Cheney is grouped with the losers: a “onetime House Republican leader who had turned on Trump and lost her job over it,” and with whom Harris campaigned, a strategy that was a “head-scratcher for Democratic operatives outside the campaign.” Not a word on Cheney’s courage and fortitude or on the career she knowingly sacrificed.
It is almost a relief to turn to Michael Wolff’s recent book about Trump, his fourth, “All or Nothing,” which also reduces American politics to a game of winners and losers but makes clearer the desperate stakes. Wolff, the one true laureate of the Trump years, knows the world Trump comes from, one ruled by media lords and tech billionaires, the “new oligarch class of American businessmen,” Wolff writes, “largely untethered to corporate respectability.” He goes at his subject with gleeful impudence toward Beltway journalists, who now show him grudging respect after having greeted his first Trump book, the vertiginously amusing “Fire and Fury,” by mining the text for trivial fact-checking errors.
In his new book, Wolff is a more faithful witness of the 2024 election than Allen and Parnes. He feels no obligation to depict Trump as a conventional presidential victor and points out, for instance, that the “contested” primaries were an almost comical walkover in which Trump was never seriously threatened and won three-quarters of the votes, losing only Vermont and the District of Columbia — and did it while traipsing in and out of courtrooms.
As for Biden, he didn’t really win in 2020, Allen and Parnes tell us (repeating the thesis of their previous book, “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency”). He prevailed because the pandemic “broke Trump.” But what president doesn’t owe victory to good luck, which is to say, the unpredictable course of contingent events? By this calculus, the Great Depression was a lucky break for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, and a stagnant economy was a lucky one for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Where, in all this, are the 155 million people who voted in 2024? They count in “Fight,” after a fashion. Or rather, they are there to be counted, the chips that the winner rakes off the table and cashes in.
That campaign operatives should think in these terms is not surprising. But that the journalists assigned to report on them should join them in this, letting their “thinking” be done by their many “sources,” repeating the same clichés and market-tested dogmas, tells us more perhaps than we want to know. No wonder Trump’s grip on both our politics and our media remains so firm. Better than anyone else, he understands that they are now fused into a single lump, which he can “shape” however he likes.
Sam Tanenhaus, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of the prizewinning biography “Whittaker Chambers.” “Buckley,” his biography of William F. Buckley Jr., will be published in June.
Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House
By Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
339 pp. William Morrow. $32
How Trump Recaptured America
