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The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House Hardcover – January 17, 2023
byChris Whipple(Author)
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From theNew York Times bestselling author ofThe Gatekeepers comes a revelatory, news-making look at how President Joe Biden and his seasoned team have battled to achieve their agenda—based on the author’s extraordinary access to the White House during two years of crises at home and abroad.
In January of 2021, the Biden administration inherited the most daunting array of challenges since FDR’s presidency: a lethal pandemic, a plummeting economy, an unresolved twenty-year war, and the aftermath of an attack on the Capitol that polarized the country. Waves of crises followed, including the fallout from a divisive Supreme Court, raging inflation, and Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Now, inThe Fight of His Life, prizewinning journalist Chris Whipple takes us inside the Oval Office as the critical decisions of Biden’s presidency are being made. With remarkable access to both President Biden and his inner circle—including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns—Whipple pulls back the curtain on the internal power struggles and back-room compromises. Featuring shocking new details about how renegade Trump officials enabled the transfer of power, which key staffers really make the White House run (it’s probably not who you think), why Joe Biden no longer speaks freely around his security detail, and what he really thinks of Vice President Kamala Harris, the press, and living in the White House,The Fight of His Lifedelivers a stunning portrait of politics on the edge.
In January of 2021, the Biden administration inherited the most daunting array of challenges since FDR’s presidency: a lethal pandemic, a plummeting economy, an unresolved twenty-year war, and the aftermath of an attack on the Capitol that polarized the country. Waves of crises followed, including the fallout from a divisive Supreme Court, raging inflation, and Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Now, inThe Fight of His Life, prizewinning journalist Chris Whipple takes us inside the Oval Office as the critical decisions of Biden’s presidency are being made. With remarkable access to both President Biden and his inner circle—including Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns—Whipple pulls back the curtain on the internal power struggles and back-room compromises. Featuring shocking new details about how renegade Trump officials enabled the transfer of power, which key staffers really make the White House run (it’s probably not who you think), why Joe Biden no longer speaks freely around his security detail, and what he really thinks of Vice President Kamala Harris, the press, and living in the White House,The Fight of His Lifedelivers a stunning portrait of politics on the edge.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateJanuary 17, 2023
- Dimensions6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101982106433
- ISBN-13978-1982106430
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
“The juicy new Biden book [that] is plenty revealing.”
—Politico West Wing Playbook
“(Whipple is) exactly the person you want to talk to right now.”
—John Dickerson, CBS News
“In this feat of a book, Whipple assesses the Biden presidency at the halfway point [and] has managed what seems to be a first: a two-year running conversation with a White House chief of staff. Whipple’s comprehensive approach adds dimension to the news stream and Whipple shines when he lets people talk…The Fight of His Lifeis a herculean effort. For any future writer eager to describe Biden’s first two years, this will be the book cited first and most often.”
—New York Times Book Review
“An inside account of the president’s term…Whipple enjoys stunning access to some of the most senior policymakers in the country.”
—Washington Post
“[An] assured account of the president’s first two years in power...fascinating and timely.”
—The Guardian
“Compelling.”
—Margaret Brennan,Face the Nation
“Offers unique insights into the Administration.”
—Newsweek
“WithThe Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,Chris Whipple has taken a crack at assessing Biden midstream, and Whipple’s credentials make him an excellent candidate to do so….There are many insider-y observations in [his] book. . . He is a sharp observer and sympathetic listener and deploys his access to the Biden White House to put you straight into the president’s mind, the book’s considerable strength.”
—Air Mail
“[A] closely observed account of the accomplished yet beleaguered Biden White House [in which] Whipple delivers a few dishy bits of inside baseball. There’s more to the current administration than meets the eye, and Whipple is a reliable, readable interpreter.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fascinating insider’s account of the first two years of the Biden administration…Whipple provides a balanced assessment of the administration’s successes and failures…Distinguished by Whipple’s impressive access and incisive character sketches, this is a valuable first draft of history.”
—Publishers Weekly
—Politico West Wing Playbook
“(Whipple is) exactly the person you want to talk to right now.”
—John Dickerson, CBS News
“In this feat of a book, Whipple assesses the Biden presidency at the halfway point [and] has managed what seems to be a first: a two-year running conversation with a White House chief of staff. Whipple’s comprehensive approach adds dimension to the news stream and Whipple shines when he lets people talk…The Fight of His Lifeis a herculean effort. For any future writer eager to describe Biden’s first two years, this will be the book cited first and most often.”
—New York Times Book Review
“An inside account of the president’s term…Whipple enjoys stunning access to some of the most senior policymakers in the country.”
—Washington Post
“[An] assured account of the president’s first two years in power...fascinating and timely.”
—The Guardian
“Compelling.”
—Margaret Brennan,Face the Nation
“Offers unique insights into the Administration.”
—Newsweek
“WithThe Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,Chris Whipple has taken a crack at assessing Biden midstream, and Whipple’s credentials make him an excellent candidate to do so….There are many insider-y observations in [his] book. . . He is a sharp observer and sympathetic listener and deploys his access to the Biden White House to put you straight into the president’s mind, the book’s considerable strength.”
—Air Mail
“[A] closely observed account of the accomplished yet beleaguered Biden White House [in which] Whipple delivers a few dishy bits of inside baseball. There’s more to the current administration than meets the eye, and Whipple is a reliable, readable interpreter.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A fascinating insider’s account of the first two years of the Biden administration…Whipple provides a balanced assessment of the administration’s successes and failures…Distinguished by Whipple’s impressive access and incisive character sketches, this is a valuable first draft of history.”
—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Chris Whipple is an author, political analyst, and Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and has contributed essays toTheNew York Times,TheWashington Post,Los Angeles Times, andVanity Fair. His first book,The Gatekeepers, an analysis of the position of White House Chief of Staff, was aNew York Timesbestseller. His follow-up,TheSpymasters, was based on interviews with nearly every living CIA Director and was critically acclaimed. Whipple lives in New York City with his wife Cary.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: What Will You Do If He Loses? ONE WHAT WILL YOU DO IF HE LOSES?
Joe Biden was restless. It was late April 2020, nearly seven months before the presidential election. Biden hadn’t even won the Democratic nomination yet; only a few months earlier, after dismal showings in the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, pundits had declared his candidacy dead. But after a stunning victory in the South Carolina primary and a string of primary wins across the South, Biden was almost sure to be his party’s nominee against Donald Trump. At his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden called up an old friend, Ted Kaufman, his next-door neighbor. “Want to go for a walk?” he asked.
Contrary to popular belief, presidential transitions don’t begin upon the election of a new president; they start almost a year before. That is when the incumbent and the front-runner for the opposing party’s nomination begin preparing for a transfer of power. On this spring morning, as he walked around a nearby schoolyard with his best friend, Kaufman, Joe Biden’s transition had begun.
Kaufman, eighty-one, was Biden’s confidant and alter ego. Lanky and slightly disheveled, with a twinkle in his eye, he resembled an older version of the actor John Lithgow. An engineer by training, Kaufman was like family; he’d been at Joe’s side during his first successful race for councilman in New Castle, Delaware, in 1970. He’d been Biden’s chief of staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was appointed to his Delaware Senate seat when Biden joined Barack Obama’s ticket in 2008. For decades, Kaufman and Biden had sat together on Amtrak while commuting between Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. “We were back and forth on the train for 4,000,827 hours,” said Kaufman. “So we talked abouteverything.”
Presidential transitions are herculean exercises. That’s why Biden’s team needed to start so early. More than 200 members of the incoming White House staff needed to be picked and readied to govern; 1,200 officials chosen and prepped for confirmation by the Senate; another 1,100, who don’t require confirmation, recruited, vetted, and hired; executive orders written, tabletop crisis exercises conducted. Kaufman explained: “If you went to a corporate CEO and said, ‘We’re going to take away the very top managers in your organization. And then we’re going to bring in a whole new team that has to go through an incredibly complicated selection process. Now let’s make it the most complex organization in the history of the world. And then let’s say that every one of your enemies around the world knows you’re at your most vulnerable when you’re turning it over.’ Are you kidding? They’dlaugh at you.”
Often, as transitions go, so do presidencies; seamless cooperation with George W. Bush’s team, beginning early in 2008, gave Barack Obama a running start when he took office in 2009. By contrast, the bobbled handoff from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, delayed by legal battles during the tumultuous 2000 recount, was cited by the 9/11 Commission as having left Bush’s national security team unprepared for the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11.
But the 2020 presidential transition was unique. It was the most contentious and dangerous since the Civil War. In his effort to remain in power, Trump tried to decapitate the Justice Department, threatened state election officials, pressured state legislators, terrorized local poll workers, and concocted slates of fake electors. When these measures failed, he incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
All of this happened in plain sight. Beneath the surface, another remarkable drama was playing out.
Donald Trump wanted no part of a presidential transition. In 2016, running against Hillary Clinton, when asked if he’d respect the results of the election, Trump had said he’d keep people “in suspense.” By early 2020 there was no suspense; Trump would acknowledge only his own victory. How could a transition begin with a president unwilling to give up his office? The task would fall to a little-known White House staffer who worked steps away from the Oval Office. His success would depend on doing everything out of Donald Trump’s sight.
Christopher Liddell was one of several assistants to the president—first in the so-called Office of American Innovation, then as deputy chief of staff for policy coordination. A New Zealand citizen, he’d come to the U.S. in 2001 to work for an Auckland-based paper company. He then jumped to the American sector, where he worked his way up to a position as chief financial officer of Microsoft and, later, vice chairman of General Motors.
Liddell, sixty-one, still spoke with a Kiwi accent, called everyone mate, and drove a bright red vintage 1960 Corvette convertible that stood out like a Christmas ornament among the limos and SUVs in the West Wing parking lot. But unlike other wealthy members of Trump’s team—Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin—Liddell kept a low profile; his passion was forprocess: organizing, managing, hitting targets. In 2012, he’d run Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s transition team so competently that it was called “the most beautiful ark that never sailed.” In a West Wing full of sycophants and conspiracy theorists, Liddell was one of the few rational people in the place.
Why was he working for Trump? Liddell was a fiscally conservative but socially moderate Republican. He didn’t like Trump’s incendiary rhetoric but thought the presidency would change him. Unfortunately, events showed that to be a fantasy. Liddell was in denial. But, oddly, his blinders served him well—because the less he knew about what Trump was doing, the better he would be at his job.
The 2020 presidential transition became a sub rosa operation, carried out under Trump’s nose. The president, publicly and privately, raged about a rigged election and threw up roadblocks, but the wheels of the transition kept turning. Ted Kaufman, Biden’s transition chairman, was amazed. “I thought they’d never cooperate with us on anything,” he told me. “And that’s not the way it worked out.” An obscure White House staffer who’d only recently become an American citizen helped make the transfer of power possible.
Yet Liddell was an unlikely leader of a plot to save democracy. One morning in January 2020, a full year before Biden’s inauguration, he’d invited two guests to breakfast in the White House Mess: Joshua Bolten, George W. Bush’s former White House chief of staff; and David Marchick, director for the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit devoted to effective transitions. Marchick had no formal role in the transfer of power, but he would play a vital part in the events to come. Bolten had run the transition between Bush and Obama, which, despite taking place during two wars and a financial crisis, was considered a model.
Over breakfast, Liddell told his guests that he was planning for a second Trump term. Bolten then asked, “Okay. Now what are your plans if he loses?” Liddell stared at his empty plate. “Well, I guess we’ve got to figure that out,” he replied. Liddell was depressed by the prospect of a defeated but defiant Trump. Throughout 2020, every time the president railed about a rigged election, Liddell considered resigning—and Bolten and Marchick talked him off the ledge. They thought of themselves as support therapists—and air traffic controllers. “He would call us and we’d say, ‘Hey, you need to land this plane. You can’t quit,’?” said Marchick. Landing the plane would become the go-to metaphor for the turbulent transition.
By the spring of 2020, Biden’s team, led by Kaufman, was anxious to get started. “We had a plan—a very, very complicated plan—and we had excellent people executing it,” he said. Kaufman’s first hire was Jeffrey Zients, a managerial wizard who, when Barack Obama’s health care website crashed upon its debut in 2013, reconfigured the site and got it up and running. For that, he was known as “Biden’s BFD,” or “Big Fucking Deal”—after the vice president’s famous off-mic remark at the signing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Other key players in the transition were Ron Klain, Biden’s longtime aide and vice-presidential chief of staff; Anita Dunn, a public relations expert and member of both the Obama and Biden inner circles; Yohannes Abraham, a former Obama national security staffer; former Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond; and New Mexico governor Lujan Grisham.
The fate of Biden’s agenda would depend on the preparations they made now, in the spring of 2020. There was no time to waste. Thousands of Americans were dying of COVID-19 every day. The economy had cratered. Cities were besieged by protesters demanding an end to police killings of unarmed Black men. The dangers posed by climate change were coming to a head. And then there was the war in Afghanistan, where 8,600 American troops were bogged down in a seemingly endless conflict. Trump had pledged to withdraw those forces by May 1, 2021. Biden’s incoming national security team would have to prepare a range of options, all problematic, for resolving America’s twenty-year quagmire.
The most urgent challenge was COVID-19. Biden ordered his transition team to bring him the news, good and bad, and to fight the pandemic as a wartime effort. That summer, as he ramped up for the challenge, Zients, who would become Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, worked in an office with the television on mute. “But every channel had the number of people who were diagnosed, the number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths,” he recalled. “Our team was asked to resolve the greatest public health crisis in a hundred years, which had cost hundreds of thousands of lives and was critical to his presidency. Was that sobering? Was that a little frightening? Absolutely.”
Zients and his team worked around the clock. “It was routine to have emails flying back and forth at all hours of the night, to have meetings at three a.m.,” said a senior adviser. Ted Kaufman recalled thinking,I’m too old for this, when he began getting emails at 5:30 a.m. The intense preparation was aimed at not wasting a moment after noon on Inauguration Day.
Biden’s team needed answers to basic questions: What was the status of the vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed? What was the plan for getting vaccine shots into people’s arms?
The first step in taming the pandemic would be climbing out of the hole that Trump and his team had dug. It was a hole that seemed to have no bottom.
From the moment the virus arrived on U.S. soil, Trump had denied that therewas a pandemic. Then he tried to wish it away, insisting that fifteen cases would go down to zero. But while he was publicly calling the coronavirus a hoax, Trump was privately telling the author Bob Woodward that it was “deadly stuff.”
There was plenty of blame to go around for the tragically inept pandemic response. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were slow to recognize the threat, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) botched the early testing. But Trump made it exponentially worse. Obama’s team had prepared a sixty-nine-page blueprint, “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” also known as the pandemic playbook. But Trump’s team had ignored it, along with other transition materials.
From neglecting warnings about the virus to pretending it would magically disappear, to failing to mobilize a federal response, to staging super-spreader campaign rallies, to ignoring safety protocols in the West Wing, Trump thoroughly fumbled the pandemic, empowering quack scientists who handicapped the nation’s response.
There was still hope that professionals at HHS and the CDC would rise to the challenge. The trouble was, few senior officials in the Trump administration knew how to make the bureaucracy work. Most had come to destroy government, not to mobilize it.
Trust in government had been the first casualty. Competence was the second. In March 2020, Vice President Mike Pence asked the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, if he could help with the COVID response. Kushner knew nothing about epidemiology or public health but was undaunted; he cleared his calendar for thirty days. Kushner started calling his friends, mostly private equity entrepreneurs in their twenties and thirties. The “slim suit crowd,” as they were dubbed, worked out of the West Wing basement and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), emailingtheir friends. There were no government laptops, so they used their smartphones.
They started cold-calling CEOs in search of testing swabs, personal protective equipment (PPEs), masks, and ventilators. When they found what they were looking for, they’d try to buy it, only to discover that the federal contracting system didn’t work that way. One day one of the slim suits came into Kushner’s office. “I ordered six hundred million masks,” he told Kushner. “Oh, that’s amazing,” Jared replied. “Where are they?” “The first order comes in June,” the young man said. “Are you fucking crazy?” said Kushner. “You know, it’s war. We’re going to be dead in June.” Kushner realized he had a big problem.
Testing had been a disaster. So Kushner started calling his corporate friends. At a briefing in the Rose Garden on March 13, clutching a cardboard chart, Dr. Deborah Birx announced that Google was constructing a website for a testing network. The trouble was, Google wasn’t. Someone from Verily, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had told Kushner that engineers were on the case. In fact, the pilot testing program was only for the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was in its early stages.
On a more positive note, Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to develop a vaccine, was off to a promising start. But in every other respect, the U.S. was failing catastrophically to contain the worst public health crisis in a century.
Biden’s team couldn’t afford to wait until January. “We had to be ready on Day One to set DOD [the Department of Defense] in motion, activating military troops to help in the fight against the pandemic,” said Zients. “We had to order FEMA to stand up a whole-of-country emergency response.” But there was no one to talk to: Trump’s DOD would not cooperate with Biden’s team. Neither would the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
No one knew who was in charge of Trump’s pandemic response team. Was it Vice President Mike Pence? Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump’s COVID-19 adviser? Kushner? A Yale epidemiology professor who’d joined Biden’s transition team, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, recalled: “Warp Speed would say, ‘Talk to CDC.’ And CDC would say, ‘Talk to Warp Speed.’ I mean, the silence was deafening.” And even if someonewere in charge, no one dared run the risk of getting caught by Trump talking to Zients and his team.
In April 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases had exceeded one million, with sixty-three thousand lives lost, more than the country suffered during the entire Vietnam War. But Kushner was upbeat: “I think you will see by June, a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country is really rocking again.”
July came and went. More than a thousand Americans were dying every day. And Donald Trump continued to rail that the upcoming election would be rigged.
Joe Biden was restless. It was late April 2020, nearly seven months before the presidential election. Biden hadn’t even won the Democratic nomination yet; only a few months earlier, after dismal showings in the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, pundits had declared his candidacy dead. But after a stunning victory in the South Carolina primary and a string of primary wins across the South, Biden was almost sure to be his party’s nominee against Donald Trump. At his home in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden called up an old friend, Ted Kaufman, his next-door neighbor. “Want to go for a walk?” he asked.
Contrary to popular belief, presidential transitions don’t begin upon the election of a new president; they start almost a year before. That is when the incumbent and the front-runner for the opposing party’s nomination begin preparing for a transfer of power. On this spring morning, as he walked around a nearby schoolyard with his best friend, Kaufman, Joe Biden’s transition had begun.
Kaufman, eighty-one, was Biden’s confidant and alter ego. Lanky and slightly disheveled, with a twinkle in his eye, he resembled an older version of the actor John Lithgow. An engineer by training, Kaufman was like family; he’d been at Joe’s side during his first successful race for councilman in New Castle, Delaware, in 1970. He’d been Biden’s chief of staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was appointed to his Delaware Senate seat when Biden joined Barack Obama’s ticket in 2008. For decades, Kaufman and Biden had sat together on Amtrak while commuting between Wilmington, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. “We were back and forth on the train for 4,000,827 hours,” said Kaufman. “So we talked abouteverything.”
Presidential transitions are herculean exercises. That’s why Biden’s team needed to start so early. More than 200 members of the incoming White House staff needed to be picked and readied to govern; 1,200 officials chosen and prepped for confirmation by the Senate; another 1,100, who don’t require confirmation, recruited, vetted, and hired; executive orders written, tabletop crisis exercises conducted. Kaufman explained: “If you went to a corporate CEO and said, ‘We’re going to take away the very top managers in your organization. And then we’re going to bring in a whole new team that has to go through an incredibly complicated selection process. Now let’s make it the most complex organization in the history of the world. And then let’s say that every one of your enemies around the world knows you’re at your most vulnerable when you’re turning it over.’ Are you kidding? They’dlaugh at you.”
Often, as transitions go, so do presidencies; seamless cooperation with George W. Bush’s team, beginning early in 2008, gave Barack Obama a running start when he took office in 2009. By contrast, the bobbled handoff from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, delayed by legal battles during the tumultuous 2000 recount, was cited by the 9/11 Commission as having left Bush’s national security team unprepared for the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11.
But the 2020 presidential transition was unique. It was the most contentious and dangerous since the Civil War. In his effort to remain in power, Trump tried to decapitate the Justice Department, threatened state election officials, pressured state legislators, terrorized local poll workers, and concocted slates of fake electors. When these measures failed, he incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
All of this happened in plain sight. Beneath the surface, another remarkable drama was playing out.
Donald Trump wanted no part of a presidential transition. In 2016, running against Hillary Clinton, when asked if he’d respect the results of the election, Trump had said he’d keep people “in suspense.” By early 2020 there was no suspense; Trump would acknowledge only his own victory. How could a transition begin with a president unwilling to give up his office? The task would fall to a little-known White House staffer who worked steps away from the Oval Office. His success would depend on doing everything out of Donald Trump’s sight.
Christopher Liddell was one of several assistants to the president—first in the so-called Office of American Innovation, then as deputy chief of staff for policy coordination. A New Zealand citizen, he’d come to the U.S. in 2001 to work for an Auckland-based paper company. He then jumped to the American sector, where he worked his way up to a position as chief financial officer of Microsoft and, later, vice chairman of General Motors.
Liddell, sixty-one, still spoke with a Kiwi accent, called everyone mate, and drove a bright red vintage 1960 Corvette convertible that stood out like a Christmas ornament among the limos and SUVs in the West Wing parking lot. But unlike other wealthy members of Trump’s team—Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin—Liddell kept a low profile; his passion was forprocess: organizing, managing, hitting targets. In 2012, he’d run Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s transition team so competently that it was called “the most beautiful ark that never sailed.” In a West Wing full of sycophants and conspiracy theorists, Liddell was one of the few rational people in the place.
Why was he working for Trump? Liddell was a fiscally conservative but socially moderate Republican. He didn’t like Trump’s incendiary rhetoric but thought the presidency would change him. Unfortunately, events showed that to be a fantasy. Liddell was in denial. But, oddly, his blinders served him well—because the less he knew about what Trump was doing, the better he would be at his job.
The 2020 presidential transition became a sub rosa operation, carried out under Trump’s nose. The president, publicly and privately, raged about a rigged election and threw up roadblocks, but the wheels of the transition kept turning. Ted Kaufman, Biden’s transition chairman, was amazed. “I thought they’d never cooperate with us on anything,” he told me. “And that’s not the way it worked out.” An obscure White House staffer who’d only recently become an American citizen helped make the transfer of power possible.
Yet Liddell was an unlikely leader of a plot to save democracy. One morning in January 2020, a full year before Biden’s inauguration, he’d invited two guests to breakfast in the White House Mess: Joshua Bolten, George W. Bush’s former White House chief of staff; and David Marchick, director for the Center for Presidential Transition at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit devoted to effective transitions. Marchick had no formal role in the transfer of power, but he would play a vital part in the events to come. Bolten had run the transition between Bush and Obama, which, despite taking place during two wars and a financial crisis, was considered a model.
Over breakfast, Liddell told his guests that he was planning for a second Trump term. Bolten then asked, “Okay. Now what are your plans if he loses?” Liddell stared at his empty plate. “Well, I guess we’ve got to figure that out,” he replied. Liddell was depressed by the prospect of a defeated but defiant Trump. Throughout 2020, every time the president railed about a rigged election, Liddell considered resigning—and Bolten and Marchick talked him off the ledge. They thought of themselves as support therapists—and air traffic controllers. “He would call us and we’d say, ‘Hey, you need to land this plane. You can’t quit,’?” said Marchick. Landing the plane would become the go-to metaphor for the turbulent transition.
By the spring of 2020, Biden’s team, led by Kaufman, was anxious to get started. “We had a plan—a very, very complicated plan—and we had excellent people executing it,” he said. Kaufman’s first hire was Jeffrey Zients, a managerial wizard who, when Barack Obama’s health care website crashed upon its debut in 2013, reconfigured the site and got it up and running. For that, he was known as “Biden’s BFD,” or “Big Fucking Deal”—after the vice president’s famous off-mic remark at the signing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Other key players in the transition were Ron Klain, Biden’s longtime aide and vice-presidential chief of staff; Anita Dunn, a public relations expert and member of both the Obama and Biden inner circles; Yohannes Abraham, a former Obama national security staffer; former Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond; and New Mexico governor Lujan Grisham.
The fate of Biden’s agenda would depend on the preparations they made now, in the spring of 2020. There was no time to waste. Thousands of Americans were dying of COVID-19 every day. The economy had cratered. Cities were besieged by protesters demanding an end to police killings of unarmed Black men. The dangers posed by climate change were coming to a head. And then there was the war in Afghanistan, where 8,600 American troops were bogged down in a seemingly endless conflict. Trump had pledged to withdraw those forces by May 1, 2021. Biden’s incoming national security team would have to prepare a range of options, all problematic, for resolving America’s twenty-year quagmire.
The most urgent challenge was COVID-19. Biden ordered his transition team to bring him the news, good and bad, and to fight the pandemic as a wartime effort. That summer, as he ramped up for the challenge, Zients, who would become Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, worked in an office with the television on mute. “But every channel had the number of people who were diagnosed, the number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths,” he recalled. “Our team was asked to resolve the greatest public health crisis in a hundred years, which had cost hundreds of thousands of lives and was critical to his presidency. Was that sobering? Was that a little frightening? Absolutely.”
Zients and his team worked around the clock. “It was routine to have emails flying back and forth at all hours of the night, to have meetings at three a.m.,” said a senior adviser. Ted Kaufman recalled thinking,I’m too old for this, when he began getting emails at 5:30 a.m. The intense preparation was aimed at not wasting a moment after noon on Inauguration Day.
Biden’s team needed answers to basic questions: What was the status of the vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed? What was the plan for getting vaccine shots into people’s arms?
The first step in taming the pandemic would be climbing out of the hole that Trump and his team had dug. It was a hole that seemed to have no bottom.
From the moment the virus arrived on U.S. soil, Trump had denied that therewas a pandemic. Then he tried to wish it away, insisting that fifteen cases would go down to zero. But while he was publicly calling the coronavirus a hoax, Trump was privately telling the author Bob Woodward that it was “deadly stuff.”
There was plenty of blame to go around for the tragically inept pandemic response. Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were slow to recognize the threat, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) botched the early testing. But Trump made it exponentially worse. Obama’s team had prepared a sixty-nine-page blueprint, “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” also known as the pandemic playbook. But Trump’s team had ignored it, along with other transition materials.
From neglecting warnings about the virus to pretending it would magically disappear, to failing to mobilize a federal response, to staging super-spreader campaign rallies, to ignoring safety protocols in the West Wing, Trump thoroughly fumbled the pandemic, empowering quack scientists who handicapped the nation’s response.
There was still hope that professionals at HHS and the CDC would rise to the challenge. The trouble was, few senior officials in the Trump administration knew how to make the bureaucracy work. Most had come to destroy government, not to mobilize it.
Trust in government had been the first casualty. Competence was the second. In March 2020, Vice President Mike Pence asked the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, if he could help with the COVID response. Kushner knew nothing about epidemiology or public health but was undaunted; he cleared his calendar for thirty days. Kushner started calling his friends, mostly private equity entrepreneurs in their twenties and thirties. The “slim suit crowd,” as they were dubbed, worked out of the West Wing basement and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), emailingtheir friends. There were no government laptops, so they used their smartphones.
They started cold-calling CEOs in search of testing swabs, personal protective equipment (PPEs), masks, and ventilators. When they found what they were looking for, they’d try to buy it, only to discover that the federal contracting system didn’t work that way. One day one of the slim suits came into Kushner’s office. “I ordered six hundred million masks,” he told Kushner. “Oh, that’s amazing,” Jared replied. “Where are they?” “The first order comes in June,” the young man said. “Are you fucking crazy?” said Kushner. “You know, it’s war. We’re going to be dead in June.” Kushner realized he had a big problem.
Testing had been a disaster. So Kushner started calling his corporate friends. At a briefing in the Rose Garden on March 13, clutching a cardboard chart, Dr. Deborah Birx announced that Google was constructing a website for a testing network. The trouble was, Google wasn’t. Someone from Verily, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had told Kushner that engineers were on the case. In fact, the pilot testing program was only for the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was in its early stages.
On a more positive note, Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to develop a vaccine, was off to a promising start. But in every other respect, the U.S. was failing catastrophically to contain the worst public health crisis in a century.
Biden’s team couldn’t afford to wait until January. “We had to be ready on Day One to set DOD [the Department of Defense] in motion, activating military troops to help in the fight against the pandemic,” said Zients. “We had to order FEMA to stand up a whole-of-country emergency response.” But there was no one to talk to: Trump’s DOD would not cooperate with Biden’s team. Neither would the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or the United States Trade Representative (USTR).
No one knew who was in charge of Trump’s pandemic response team. Was it Vice President Mike Pence? Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump’s COVID-19 adviser? Kushner? A Yale epidemiology professor who’d joined Biden’s transition team, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, recalled: “Warp Speed would say, ‘Talk to CDC.’ And CDC would say, ‘Talk to Warp Speed.’ I mean, the silence was deafening.” And even if someonewere in charge, no one dared run the risk of getting caught by Trump talking to Zients and his team.
In April 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases had exceeded one million, with sixty-three thousand lives lost, more than the country suffered during the entire Vietnam War. But Kushner was upbeat: “I think you will see by June, a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July the country is really rocking again.”
July came and went. More than a thousand Americans were dying every day. And Donald Trump continued to rail that the upcoming election would be rigged.
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner
- Publication date : January 17, 2023
- Language : English
- Print length : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1982106433
- ISBN-13 : 978-1982106430
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #905,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #281 inUnited States Executive Government
- #1,070 inUS Presidents
- #3,046 inTraveler & Explorer Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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4.2 out of 5 stars
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Customers find the book to be a fascinating read with uncompromising reporting, with one review highlighting its depth into staff and policies. They appreciate the insights, with one customer noting it provides a great inside look at politics. The writing quality receives mixed reactions from customers.
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15 customers mention "Readability"12 positive3 negative
Customers find the book engaging and fascinating, with one customer noting it reads like a thriller.
"...Superbly written;reads like a thriller."Read more
"Excellent book. He was a great president."Read more
"...Theread was good. I liked Whipple style. But as far as looking at things objectively, that is where he looses me...."Read more
"Thisbook is boring and reads as if it were written by Biden's close advisors. It is a highly biased book by an obvious Biden fan...."Read more
8 customers mention "Reporting quality"7 positive1 negative
Customers appreciate the reporting quality of the book, with one customer highlighting its in-depth coverage of the president's staff and policies, while another notes its excellent analysis.
"I finished this in a couple of days.Good overview of President Biden's first 2 years as President of the United States...."Read more
"...and decisionmaking processes, with numerous eye-opening,previously unreported revelations. Superbly written; reads like a thriller."Read more
"...but are quickly given agood working overview of the process and tremendous problems of this historic event...."Read more
"Anexcellent analysis of President Biden and his administration. Great depth into his staff and policies...."Read more
4 customers mention "Insight"3 positive1 negative
Customers appreciate the book's insights, with one review highlighting its detailed look at key players and another noting its excellent perspective on politics.
"...Author Chris Whipple does anexcellent job of providing such insight, and that's the best part of the book and why I gave it three stars...."Read more
"...Great insights into the key players, events and decisionmaking processes, with numerous eye-opening, previously unreported revelations...."Read more
"Disappointing Bias Clothed as Insightful Objectivity..."Read more
"...If you want anexcellent inside look at politics, this is your book."Read more
3 customers mention "Writing quality"2 positive1 negative
Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book.
"...Superbly written; reads like a thriller."Read more
"This is asurprisingly poorly written book, considering the reputation of its author, Chris Whipple...."Read more
"...Why not five stars, then? Because, while Whipple employsgood writing skills and the tremendous advantage of ample access to Biden and his team, he..."Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2023Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseI have not finished Whipple’s book, but I feel compelled to convey my first impressions.
I have taught history and civics to middle school and high school students for fifty years. I thought I knew civics and really kept up with the news. But, brother, am I getting an education!
Whipple starts with the transition from the Trump to Biden administration. This could be dry stuff but it is gripping. We don’t get bogged down in details (though extensive citations allow you to go much deeper) but are quickly given a good working overview of the process and tremendous problems of this historic event.
The creativity of how to get the transition started and completed in the face of covid, Trump and Putin is amazing and well told.
There is much more but I encourage anyone interested in American history or concerned about the ongoing threats to American civil society and the rule of law to read this book.
One thing though: I think Chris Whipple’s academic background should have been included. - Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2025Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseExcellent book. He was a great president.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2023Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseFairly or not, I expected something as engaging as Bob Woodward's books, and this is not.
It IS interesting, but not great. Perhaps there was too much of a rush to get it published, sacrificing polish in the process?
The narrative draws so much on quotes that I wondered if the story would be different if Whipple interviewed different people. The quotes are from knowledgeable folks, some in the Biden WH and some from past administrations, both Democratic and Republican. - Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2023Format: KindleVerified PurchaseI finished this in a couple of days. Good overview of President Biden's first 2 years as President of the United States. They were anything but easy. That said he probably accomplished more in 2 years than most presidents accomplish in a full presidential term.. A lot of his eventual legacy will probably depend on what happens in Ukraine. On Afghanistan I don't think that there was any way to come out a winner either way.
I don't particularly care for Senator Joe Manchin but at least I can see where he was coming from. I didn't like how hard he was to move on Build Back Better but at least it passed in some form.
And although Biden suffered some notable losses I thought it was extraordinary how he was able to accomplish so much in such a closely divided Congress. I don't know what his next 2 years are going to look like but he has bipartisan skill. I wouldn't underestimate him. - Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2024Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI gave it as gifts to my political junkie friends and they loved it. Note that there is an epilogue which brings the journey almost to the present. If you want an excellent inside look at politics, this is your book.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2024Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThis is a surprisingly poorly written book, considering the reputation of its author, Chris Whipple. He clearly is no Bob Woodward when it comes to describing behind-the-scenes events of a presidential administration in anything close to a seemingly objective manner. He appears to have taken as gospel whatever his interviewees claim to be going on, never questioning their accuracy and honesty, and he fails to double-check clearly false claims by asking other participants of the events. For example, he repeated several times a purely fictional account of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia when the Robert Lee statue was being torn down, without any apparent fact-checking. I was there, Chris. What you (and President Biden) claim went on simply did not happen. All in all, the contents are so one-sided politically that one would assume the book was written by a Biden Administration sycophant, slobbering over every pearl of wisdom emitted by Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, without questioning Klain's credibility.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2023Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseI am a presidential historian. My library contains almost 1000 volumes with at least one book on each president and more than 20 on some. Though it is optimal to wait approximately 20 years after a president has left office to evaluate that presidency, I find it also interesting to read about a president while he's currently serving.
Unfortunately, there's not much out there about Joe Biden yet. Partly, of course, because he's been president for only two years thus far. But also because to a great extent, his presidency has been rather humdrum.
Biden-bashers call him "the worst president ever," while supporters compare him to FDR. The truth sits somewhere at or near the very middle of those two polar extremes.
Accordingly, I search for books that are not so biased as to be devoid of any usefulness. I want to know: how hands-on is Biden? Who are his key advisors? What issues is he most passionate about behind closed doors? Does he have character traits and personality quirks that can lead us to speculate about his future actions?
Author Chris Whipple does an excellent job of providing such insight, and that's the best part of the book and why I gave it three stars.
Why not five stars, then? Because, while Whipple employs good writing skills and the tremendous advantage of ample access to Biden and his team, he ruins it with unhinged bias. Not favorable bias toward Biden, but over-the-top swipes at Biden's immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who isn't even the subject of the book.
Granted, others have made the mistake of reporting that Trump called Neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, VA "very fine people" (he didn't, as I thoroughly explain in my book Trumped-Up Charges!; he was referring to "very fine people on both sides" of the debate about whether to retain Confederate statues for their historical significance or remove them because they offend contemporary sensibilities). But Whipple doesn't stop there. He writes, among other things, that Trump "glorifies political violence" and tried to "sabotage" our NATO alliance.
When an author is so wildly off the mark, apparently having swallowed conventional reports without digging deeper to get a better perspective on the truth, it makes it difficult to trust that person as a credible source.
That's a shame, because otherwise, this book could've been a fine entry into the anthology of early Biden presidency historiography.
For a considerably more balanced book on Biden's presidency thus far, consider Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
