They had served their time. Jonathan Allen, a political reporter at NBC News, and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent at The Hill, had written bestsellers about the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. They were done. Then came the night in June when President Joe Biden sank his own campaign with a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.
“In the weeks leading up to the debate, we had sources—both of us—ask us if we were going to do a book,” Parnes says. “And we both said, ‘No, no, we’ve been there, done that.’”
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House arrived this week, loaded with, well, insider details about how Biden, Trump, and Kamala Harris tried to win the presidency: Biden aides laying down strips of fluorescent tape to help guide the president’s walk through a New Jersey fundraiser; Trump surprisingly turning away from chaos and turning down Corey Lewandowski’s bid to oust rival campaign aides; and Harris being hamstrung by Biden’s insistence that there be “no daylight” between the two Democrats.
I spoke with Allen and Parnes at a moment when the consequences of the 2024 election were hitting hard, everywhere from Wall Street to Kyiv. In the interview, edited for length and clarity, the two described how they discovered more Democratic dysfunction than was apparent at the time, and how Trump’s team kept its candidate under control. Mostly.
Vanity Fair: The opening scene of the book describes a series of power players as they watch the fateful Biden-Trump debate. Where were the two of you that night?
Jonathan Allen: I was at Shelly’s Back Room on F Street Northwest in Washington, smoking a cigar, watching the debate, and calling and texting with sources.
Amie Parnes: I was at home. My phone was blowing up. I think I had maybe 50 text exchanges that night with freaked-out lawmakers, strategists, basically everyone—Republicans, Democrats. I often go back and look at those messages because they were surreal.
At that point, in June 2024, President Biden’s physical and mental capacities had long been a central issue in the campaign. Was his terrible debate performance still a surprise to you?
Parnes: It was just stunning to watch.
Allen: We’d been watching Biden’s decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020. And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought.
Your book describes the lengths to which the president’s longtime inner circle—including first lady Jill Biden and senior advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti—went to hide that decline. Who was most responsible?
Parnes: All of them. It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off. He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.
How large a part of the equation was Hunter Biden?
Allen: Most people have looked at Hunter Biden as somebody that his father has had to deal with. And what we really found in the reporting here is that Hunter Biden is somebody that his father wanted to deal with on political issues, that Hunter was, as was described to us by one source, his father’s closest political adviser, which is mind-blowing. I mean, if you’re seeking—and I don’t mean this to knock Hunter Biden in an untoward way, but it is not clear that he has the best record as somebody you would lean on for judgment.
The book doesn’t use the word cover-up to describe the effort to conceal the extent of Joe Biden’s deficits. Was it one?
Allen: I think our view is that there is more complexity to it. Largely, the people who are closest to the person in power are people who do not tell that person things they don’t wanna hear…If you were going to stand up and say something, you would be thrown out of the room. That basically happened with Anita Dunn toward the end.
