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After the disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden on June 27, 2024, President Donald Trump and his team were jubilant. Biden’s team was crushed. And Senate Democrats were in an absolute panic.
Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf are out with a new book on last year’s tumultuous presidential campaign. Like "Fight" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes and "Original Sin" by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, "2024" has within it much that is familiar, as well as many blasts of new details.
The most stunning reveal of the book comes on pages 182-184, wherein the dynamics of a Democratic Senate Conference gathering at the offices of the Democratic Senatorial Committee are recounted.
Every Democratic senator was present save for Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, and the account is both full of hysteria and is pretty hysterical to read. (Senator Alex Padilla recited the Serenity Prayer, for example, and when Senator John Fetterman demands a show of hands of support for Biden and only Fetterman, Delaware’s Chris Coon’s and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois raise their hands.)
Stuck into the account of this gathering is the demand from "Jack Reed of Rhode Island [who] said two independent neurologists should evaluate Biden and release their findings."
Think about that. Reed is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services committee and a serious man. West Point. Harvard Law. Genuinely respected by his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. While many in his caucus are worried about politics, Reed is worried about whether President Biden has cognitive impairment.
What Tapper and Thompson established with great detail in their book —that hundreds and hundreds of Democrats at the party’s highest levels had deep concerns about Biden— Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf largely avoid confronting while detailing like no other book to date the incredible dysfunction of both the original Biden campaign and its successor Harris campaign.
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2024 is the stuff of nightmares for Democrats, nightmares that are not going away anytime soon. Can anyone in the party’s circle of consultants and donors actually run a campaign? The Beltway elites of the left are very long in the tooth and perhaps more angry with each other than they are with President Trump. The knives came out right after the Biden debate (Nancy Pelosi put her’s into Biden’s back; Chuck Schumer drove the dagger in from the front. Now lots of folks are carving up their rivals through interviews with book writers.)
While Democrats have fallen into depression and denial, President Trump is marching from victory to victory. That is in part because he’s done the job before and knows exactly what he wants and partly because he’s got Susie Wiles as his chief of staff. I don’t know Wiles, but the portrait Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf paint is compelling on the facts of Wiles’ competence and character (and that of Chris LaCivita, Wiles’ principal deputy on the campaign) as well as the bulk of Team Trump 2024.
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2028 will have its own dynamics and probably at least 20 candidates combined from the two parties. Republicans have to hope that Wiles stays put, but the competition for LaCivita’s services among GOP would-be nominees will be intense.
Will any Democrat want anyone from either the Biden or the Harris teams to be on their staff? "2024" should be read by every would-be Democratic nominee. There are a lot of Beltway political "experts" who are anything but. Forewarned is forearmed.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.