Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.
Politico Playbook reports on a 2024 memo urging Biden to debate early. Oops.
With friends like these: In the ill-fated briefing document, dated April 15, 2024, Biden’s senior advisers told him not to wait for the autumn dates proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates — the first of which, they noted, was scheduled after mail-in ballots would start going out — but instead to arrange a head-to-head with Trump within a matter of weeks. The memo was obtained by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, in the process of reporting their new book, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” which is out tomorrow.
Read it and weep: “By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible,” Biden’s top aides told him — and by the way, every reference to Biden is written in attention-grabbing all-caps and bold — “before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics and family vacations taking precedence. In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos.”
Reality check: As readers may recall, it didn’t quite work out that way. More than 50 million Americans did indeed get the chance to see Biden stand next to Trump at the CNN debate on June 27. But the president melted down; his basic faculties failing him, his reelection hopes essentially torched inside 15 minutes. It was the most disastrous TV debate in history. Read the full memo here
And there’s more: The book says support for an early debate was not unanimous among the president’s aides, and that some members of Biden world felt he should not go head-to-head with Trump at all. One unnamed donor called the White House in May, the book reports, “alarmed” by a recent appearance by the president at a Chicago fundraiser, and urged his team to “find an excuse” to get him out of the debates. This was rejected out of hand.
