Page 2 of 107 Days

As soon as he walked onto the debate stage in Atlanta, I could see he wasn’t right.

He’d had neuropathy in his feet for years.

Then he’d fractured his foot playing with one of his dogs.

His doctor had prescribed a boot, but he was too stubborn to wear it, and I’m positive that screwed up his gait.

Now he walked unsteadily, trying to balance himself with robotically moving hands.

He’d called me a couple of days earlier from Camp David, where he was in the middle of debate prep. It was late afternoon, and I’d been working from home in Los Angeles. I pulled up a chair overlooking our backyard.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“It’s going. It’s okay.” He sounded downbeat and extremely tired. He didn’t mention that he was coming down with a cold.

“Are you getting some rest? You need to take a break, you know.”

Debate camp is awful. They break you to make you.

They prod at all your missteps, all your weaknesses; find holes in your arguments; savage your delivery.

It leaves you feeling barely competent. From there, they build you back up, running through every possible line of attack until you feel invulnerable.

With the debate fast approaching, Joe should have been in that second phase.

By the time he made that call to me, he should have been more upbeat.

But he didn’t sound that way, and it worried me.

I reminded him about the tactics we’d previously discussed in dealing with Trump: alternate brushing him off like lint on your shoulder or striking back aggressively.

His voice lightened as he recalled how his mother had once promised him a quarter if he went back and punched the bully who’d been picking on him.

He did, and she gave him fifty cents. Telling the story seemed to put him in better spirits, so I wished him luck and, trying to buck him up, told him he was going to kill it.

I hung up feeling sorry for him. I knew he didn’t want to do this debate, and it seemed like he just needed to talk to someone who would understand what it feels like, what it would take.

Within the campaign, there’d been a whole debate about whether he should debate.

Joe had seemed reluctant from the start.

Jill didn’t seem to think he should, either.

Trump’s refusal to debate during his party’s primary had cleared a plausible path for avoiding it.

Nancy Pelosi, for one, argued that Biden didn’t need to lower the dignity of the presidency by appearing onstage with a convicted felon who’d tried to subvert the last election.

But some of his most trusted advisers were insistent that this would be the split-screen moment he needed.

The campaign was stuck, fighting with Trump for the same limited pool of disengaged or undecided voters.

Doubts about Biden’s age and capacity had been fueled by the report of Special Counsel Robert Hur on his retention of classified documents.

Hur had concluded that he couldn’t get a conviction because a jury would perceive Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report had detailed concerning lapses.

I knew very well that when he was tired, his age showed, and I also knew that depositions can be grueling.

And this one began October 8, the morning after Hamas had viciously attacked Israel, when Biden had spent long hours in classified meetings, monitoring the crisis.

He would have had the weight of those events, still very much in flux and threatening regional war, on his mind.

Trump’s ravings had been getting progressively crazier as the campaign went on.

If Biden had lost a step, Trump had, too.

Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, another of Joe’s senior advisers, had become convinced a debate at this relatively early stage could change the trajectory of the campaign.

(And so it did, just not in the way they had anticipated.) These decisions were being made by his inner team, and in the end, I had to accept that they had convinced themselves that Biden could do this.

In 2012, after Barack Obama had flubbed his first debate against Mitt Romney, Biden, as vice president, had trounced Paul Ryan so badly that Sarah Palin said it reminded her of a musk ox running across the tundra with someone underfoot.

The nation had just watched Biden deliver a stirring State of the Union address.

Donilon and Dunn insisted that the president could do at least as well as he had against Trump in 2020.

I’d been campaigning on the West Coast in the days just before the debate—doing Spanish language press and outreach in Arizona, meeting major fundraisers in California, and attending gatherings with Black influencers in Los Angeles.

That morning I’d met with the R MAGA was not a typical party.

He brought a fighter’s mentality to the job.

Sheila Nix, my campaign chief of staff, had come to DC from law school to work at a law firm, been recruited to help with Senator Bob Kerrey’s presidential campaign, and loved every minute.

Since then, she’d toggled between campaign work and issue-driven jobs, like working for Bono on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

She’d also worked as Jill Biden’s chief of staff, so she had good relations with the Biden team.

The third person in the room was my director of comms, Kirsten Allen, a veteran of tight races and high-pressure situations.

I’d spotted her in 2018, working for Andrew Gillum, when he lost the Florida governor’s race to Ron DeSantis by a hair, in one of the closest gubernatorial races in history.

She’d been my press secretary and special assistant to Joe Biden, and had been our national press secretary for the Covid response.

Jake Tapper’s first question, predictably, was on the economy.

Biden answered in a thready voice, rushing through his answer.

There was no light in his eyes, no expression in his voice.

They’ve loaded him up with too many stats, I thought, as he blurted out numbers.

The first question is always difficult. He needs to warm up.

He’ll settle down; he’ll get on top of it.

The next question was on the military. He’s got so much material on this—Trump calling our fallen soldiers “suckers and losers.” He managed to get off that line but had stepped on it earlier by saying no one had died in wars overseas on his watch, seeming to forget the thirteen marines who died in the bomb blast at the airport during the evacuation of Afghanistan.

I’d been on Air Force Two when it happened, and we had to change our flight plan to get back to DC in the face of that tragedy.

How could he overlook that day? I know his deep feelings for those men and women. It’s personal to him.

Trump, meanwhile, was using his words like a weapon, but shooting before he aimed, spouting lies, unburdened by the truth.

Biden, striving for accuracy, often stopped midsentence to correct himself, which left him sounding hesitant and garbled.

I knew the important policy points he was struggling to convey, and I knew he knew them.

He is a master of this material, but that was not coming across at all.

And then, at the end of a string of convoluted sentences in which he twice confused millions and billions, Joe lost his train of thought entirely, looked disoriented, and blurted out, “We finally beat Medicare.”

Trump’s reply: “Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death.”

As the ninety minutes ground on, my staffers watched with one eye on the big screen, the other on the small screens in their hands.

They were tracking reactions on social media: “Disaster.” “Train wreck.” “Embarrassment.” Kirsten and Sheila were texting each other: Are other people seeing what we’re seeing? Is it as bad as we think?

Doug, at a watch party with Hollywood donors, was getting an earful. Rob Reiner had screamed at him: “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy and it’s your fault!”