A grimly hilarious detail about the dynamics between the staff of Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden, in  Jonathan Allen’s and Amie Parnes’s forthcoming book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.

Aides to Kamala Harris, the vice-president who assumed the nomination then lost to Trump, “strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office”.

Such planning was led by Jamal Simmons, Harris’s White House communications director, Parnes and Allen report, and went as far as the drawing up of a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who might swear Harris in.

Simmons “never told the vice president about the death-pool roster before leaving her camp in January 2023,” the authors write, “but he advised colleagues that he should be notified immediately if something happened to Biden, because he had worked out an entire communications strategy. And he left the spreadsheet with another Harris aide.”

Ah, another edition of “Now it can be told!”

Simmons left the Harris team in January 2o23, which means the discussions of which judge should be contacted to swear in Harris were held well before White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted in November 2023, “I would put the president’s stamina, the president’s wisdom, ability to get this done on behalf of the American people, against anyone. Anyone, on any day of the week.”