In a political bombshell that’s already sending ripples across the Democratic Party, former Vice President Kamala Harris has leveled stinging critiques at Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign in her new memoir, 107 Days. The book, slated for release later this month, offers a rare and unvarnished look at the tumultuous months leading up to the Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 presidential race, which saw Donald Trump return to the White House. Harris’s candid reflections, published on September 11, 2025, have reignited debate about Biden’s decision to seek a second term—and the internal frictions that plagued his administration’s highest ranks.
According to excerpts published by France 24 and The Atlantic, Harris does not mince words about what she calls the “recklessness” of Biden’s campaign. She describes the president’s decision to run again as a deeply personal one, made primarily by Joe and Jill Biden, and laments how the party seemed to accept this as gospel. “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
This sense of fatalism, Harris argues, was a mistake. She contends that the stakes in 2024 were simply too high to leave such a consequential choice to individual ambition or ego. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego or ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision,” she reflects in the memoir. The comments, quoted by Black Enterprise, have struck a nerve with many Democrats still reeling from the party’s loss.
Harris, who ultimately lost her own bid for the presidency to Trump, admits in the book that she wrestled privately with whether to urge Biden to step aside. “During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she confesses. Yet she feared that any such advice would be perceived as “naked ambition” or “poisonous disloyalty.”
Age was a recurring theme in Harris’s concerns. She writes that at 81, Biden’s fatigue became evident in both physical and verbal stumbles on the campaign trail. “At 81, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles,” Harris notes. However, she is careful to clarify that she never believed Biden was incapacitated. “If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
But the memoir is not simply a postmortem on the campaign’s strategy. Harris’s account delves into the internal dynamics of the Biden administration, painting a picture of a vice president often left isolated and undercut by her own colleagues. She describes a White House culture that, in her view, failed to defend her against right-wing attacks—particularly those related to her assignment to handle migration at the southern border, a responsibility Biden had delegated to her. “When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved,” she writes.
Harris also claims that the administration’s communications team was all but silent when it came to defending her against unfair criticism or highlighting her accomplishments. “Getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible,” she laments. The former California senator further alleges that Biden’s staff sometimes even fueled negative narratives about her. “I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative narratives that sprang up around me,” she reveals.
According to The Independent, Harris’s memoir accuses some Biden aides of actively undermining her during her vice presidency and sabotaging her 2024 presidential chances. She writes, “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. His team didn’t get it.” She also recalls that when negative stories about her surfaced, “the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
Not surprisingly, these revelations have provoked sharp pushback from Biden’s former aides. One anonymous former official, speaking to Axios, dismissed Harris’s complaints outright: “Vice President Harris was simply not good at the job. She had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams, and instead would just dive bomb in for stilted photo ops that exposed how out of depth she was.” The official insisted that Biden was “not the reason she struggled in office or tanked her 2019 [presidential] campaign. Or lost the 2024 campaign, for that matter. The independent variable there is the vice president, not Biden or his aides.”
Another Biden aide, quoted by Axios, was similarly dismissive of Harris’s regrets about not speaking up sooner: “I’m not sure the very robust defense of not having the courage to speak up in the moment about Biden running is quite as persuasive as she thinks it is. If this is her attempt at political absolution: Lots of luck in your senior year.”
Yet, not everyone in Biden’s orbit is piling on. Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, offered a more sympathetic take, telling The Independent that he thought Harris “did a good job” as vice president and that he “felt badly that she found the experience negative.” Another former aide acknowledged to Axios that the Biden team’s treatment of Harris and her staff was less than ideal: “We all know that Biden folks treated her and her team like s***. We never thought she would actually say anything. The staffers across a range of ages and positions that I’m talking to are proud of her.”
Amid the swirl of recriminations and finger-pointing, one thing is clear: Harris’s memoir has reopened old wounds within the Democratic Party and reignited debate over the challenges of managing generational change and internal dissent at the highest levels of government. As of September 11, 2025, Joe Biden has not commented on the revelations in Harris’s book, leaving the public and political observers to sift through the fallout on their own.
The publication of 107 Days is sure to fuel further discussion about how the Democrats lost their grip on the White House—and whether the lessons of 2024 will shape the party’s future. For now, Harris’s account stands as a rare, if controversial, window into the personal and political calculations that defined a pivotal moment in American history.
