Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden griped about being upstaged during his 2020 campaign by his wife Jill and running mate Kamala Harris, leaving him open to attacks from President Trump that he was hiding in his “basement,” a new book says.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Biden grew concerned that the number of public appearances he was doing was “not keeping pace” with Harris and Jill, New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers writes in her book about modern first ladies, “American Woman.”
“Jill was hitting the campaign trail and traveling so much in the weeks before the election that her team was using two private jets,” according to Rogers.
“Her schedule far outpaced that of her husband, who was widely criticized by the president and others for not holding enough in-person campaign appearances. (‘He’s in his damn basement again’ was one of Donald’s favorite rally refrains.)”
On a call with his campaign strategists, Biden vented that he was also “unsatisfied” about his vice presidential pick “crisscrossing the country,” as he headed north in a motorcade for an event in Bristol, Pa.
Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who “instituted testing protocols to protect the septuagenarian nominee,” tried to reassure him that Harris was doing her part.
“I didn’t ask you what she was doing,” Biden brusquely replied. “I’m asking you why I’m not doing more.”
Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, though he had won several of them in his matchup four years earlier against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The exchange jibes with reports from inside the White House of the president’s fiery temper and others recounted by Rogers and journalists who have seen Biden fly off the handle firsthand.
In his landmark book about the 1988 presidential campaign, Richard Ben Cramer wrote about the then-Delaware senator screaming at one of his aides, Ruth Berry, in front of his wife.
Jill and Berry had been discussing the expectations of a first lady, when Biden broke in and urged her to “just do what you’re comfortable with” before blasting his staffer.
“Goddammit!” he fumed. “Don’t you ever tell Jill what she’s got to do.”
Rogers reproduced the interaction in her book, underscoring how the “tight-knit Biden family prizes loyalty from their aides” while adding that Jill and Joe in the 2020 campaign “relaxed” those “rigid loyalty rules when an operative’s strategic value outweighs their past infractions.”
Those included Ron Klain, who “had run afoul of the Biden loyalty test” for serving on Clinton’s 2016 campaign after being a dedicated aide to the Delaware senator, and Harris, who “put the Biden campaign on its heels,” by confronting him in a primary debate about his past opposition to school busing in the 1970s.
But choosing Harris as his eventual running mate didn’t stop the future first lady from privately saying to supporters the then-California senator should “Go f—” herself.
“With what he cares about, what he fights for, what he’s committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis?” she exploded on a phone call following the debate.
“She obviously wanted to protect her husband,” a person close to Jill Biden told Rogers of the incident. “She’s always going to pause and say, ‘Are you sure we’re making the right decision?’”
Harris is still “liked by the president,” other aides tell Rogers, but other journalists have also mentioned Biden being “annoyed” by his vice president and 2024 running mate, who he views as a “work in progress.”