Review: "Fight," On The 2024 Election, By Allen & Parnes

 

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House

By Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes

William Morrow; hardcover; $32.00; also available in E-Book and Digital Audio

Jonathan Allen is an award-winning political reporter at NBC News, and the author of three books with his writing partner, Amie Parnes, including two New York Times bestsellers, HRC and Shattered. Allen previously worked as the Washington bureau chief for Bloomberg News, and the White House bureau chief at Politico. 

Amie Parnes is a senior political correspondent who covers national politics for The Hill. She previously worked as a staff writer at Politico, and was a CNN political analyst during the first Trump administration.

Fight is one of the first books to chronicle what can arguably be called the wildest Presidential election in American history, as what started out as a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, which was largely dreaded by the public, turned into a thrilling battle at the end. 

It was a wild ride complete with Trump's endless battles in court and surviving an assassination attempt, and the Democrats swapping out Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris with just over a few months until Election Day.

This book is a story of Trump, Biden, and Harris, as told through real-time interviews with 150 insiders, from the three candidates' inner circles, plus party leaders and operatives. There is a particular focus on the 107 days that the race was between Trump and Harris.

The race turned on its head on June 27 when Trump and Biden debated, and the President imploded on live television. This set off a frantic effort by former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and spurred on by former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, to force Biden out of the race, and take Harris with him. Pelosi's mantra at the time was, "He goes, she goes." Harris headed that off by having Biden endorse her shortly after he dropped out. To earn that, Biden had Harris agree to a critical stipulation that there should be "no daylight" between them as a condition for his support.

Even after getting Biden's endorsement, Harris worked the phones to lock down the votes for her nomination at the Democratic National Convention in late August, as a way to head off Obama, Pelosi, and others in the party who weren't thrilled with her. Obama called up Democratic House leader Jim Clyburn the afternoon Biden dropped out to push for an open nomination process, but Clyburn was unwilling and Harris was already being annointed.

Allen and Parmes reveal that Democratic Party operatives started making contingency plans for a possible Biden death or withdrawal from the race in 2023. At that time, Harris' team had a spreadsheet of Republican federal judges who were not appointed by Trump so that she could be sworn in on short notice while traveling by someone more credible to Republican voters.

By that point, Biden's third year in office, it was clear how frail he was, and his staff was having trouble hiding it from the American people. They resorted to tactics such as putting fluorescent tape on the floor to point him in the right direction to extensive makeup sessions. When Biden traveled, a make-up artist would meet him in the morning when he traveled, covering up the physical signs of age before he went on Zoom calls with his own aides. While he always made his make-up appointments, he sometimes canceled the ensuing briefings.

While it would seem like a lot of the drama was on the Democratic side, maybe because they lost and somehow that seemed so preventable, there was plenty of chaos around Trump, which wasn't exactly revelatory.

As with the first time Trump ran for President, there was a battle for leadership of his campaign. In a tense moment on Trump Force One, as his campaign plane was known, Trump exiled former campaign manager (2016) Corey Lewandowski, who tried to dethrone the '24 campaign chiefs Susie Wiles (daughter of NFL announcer Pat Summerall) and Chris LaCivita. Trump declared, "They're in charge.

Wiles features prominently in this book, as she should, including this premonition she had during Trump's campaign finance fraud trial in New York - "I just worry that if they can't get him this way, they'll try to kill him." 

Trump was shot in the ear by an assassin's bullet just after he took the stage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. One of the most gripping parts of this book is the race to protect Trump and race him to the hospital after he hit the ground. First Lady Melania Trump called her husband to tell him to stay with her in New Jersey rather than head back to Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

Two days after that shocking moment was the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, and Trump revealed that his running mate would be Senator JD Vance. The authors take you inside Trump Force One as he makes that final decision on his Vice Presidential pick, while aides battled it out for his entertainment as proxies for Vance and Senator Marco Rubio, who is now the Secretary of State. That's the first real acknowledgment of who came in second to Vance in the running to be the VP nominee, as there were numerous names floated.

There is plenty on the conventions, with the most interesting tidbit on the DNC was about Biden, which is consistent throughout the book. The authors give a look backstage on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, and the frantic conversations to get Biden on stage, after organizers ran late and then the program was sped up to get the President on stage and avoid his wrath.

There was only one debate between Trump and Harris, on September 10, with a look at how Harris prepared for it to be "radically ready" to take on Trump. From that point to the finish, there's an examination of where each candidate spent time, such as the curious decision to send Harris to Texas 11 days ahead of the vote, which campaign officials presented as a chance to highlight the state's abortion laws, but was really to be close to podcaster Joe Rogan's Austin studio.

This story goes right up to election night, in each campaigns' boiler rooms and the residences and minds of both candidates, with one particularly shocked at the outcome. In the end, Trump won by tapping into the anger people had at the direction of the country, and Democrats couldn't connect as they were still trying to convince people that Biden delivered economic prosperity. Also noted is how Biden pledged to be a "bridge" President when he ran in 2020, and his breaking that pledge didn't endear himself to voters.

Allen and Parnes write in this excerpt how it wasn't just this past summer, but the one before, that the real concerns about Biden came to the forefront: In June 2023, one year before the debate and two months after he'd formally announced that he would seek reelection, Biden entered a reception at the Pool Lounge, an elegant glass-and-steel-lined event space inside the Mies van de Rohe-designed Seagram Building, on Park Avenue. Biden arrived by motorcade as service workers arranged a dessert bar with an assortment of donuts: chocolate blackout, blueberry, and key lime. It was his second pitch for cash that night, this time with heavy-hitting Wall Street donors, and the president appeared to be out of sorts when investment banker Blair Effron introduced him to a crowd of about fifty donors at 7:30 p.m.

While wealthy contributors listened to Biden brag about "Bidenomics" and warn that "there's so much at stake," the president's muscles tightened. His speech slurred. His body locked up for a moment - just long enough to leave at least one audience member concerned that he might not make it to Election Day. Others wondered if he had the faculties to compete for the presidency. "It wasn't just physical," said one decades-long acquaintance of Biden who was at the reception and witnessed similar episodes from time to time during his presidency.

Hours earlier, Biden had curiously gotten up from his chair on the set of MSNBC's Deadline: White House and wandered off behind host Nicolle Wallace before she could transition from their interview to a commercial break. A clip of the disoriented president instantly went viral on social media, racking up more than 2 million views.

Throughout his term, Biden fed into Republican claims that the White House lights were on but no one was home. He seldom held press conferences or participated in extended interviews. He relied heavily on printed talking points with extra-large lettering when meeting privately with lawmakers and members of the Cabinet. He often tripped over his words during public remarks. His aides wrote off these episodes as unreflective of the sharp mind they said they encountered at the White House every day. They regaled reporters with stories of Biden poring over thick briefing books and driving action in his administration - protecting the president with a counternarrative - that were dutifully reported in print and on the air...

Publicly, Democrats scoffed at Republican claims that Biden wasn't up to the job. But privately, some of them worried all along that they were putting too much stock in an old man who, at best, had long since lost his fastball."