‘Fight’ is An Accurate Chronicle of American Political Surreality

There’s a small, subtle phrase near the end of ‘Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House‘ that goes a long way to understanding the flawed premises underscoring this whole trend of election-explaining texts, for which Fight is only the opening shot. Kamala Harris had been gaslit too. Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes have impeccable credentials for this kind of journalistic book. This isn’t to say the competition is any slouch- Chris Whipple of the upcoming Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History is an accomplished journalist in his own right. But Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes are in the unique position of having written Shattered about the 2016 campaign and Lucky about the 2020 campaign.

Lucky didn’t get quite the coverage that Shattered got, partially because the 2016 campaign was a lot more shocking, but more crucially, because Lucky’s cold appraisal of Joe Biden only narrowly winning an election he probably should have lost was rather at odds with the quickly emerging narrative that not only had Joe Biden won in a landslide, it was outright treasonous of Donald Trump to even suggest there was anything unusual about the circumstances of that election.

Allen and Parnes clearly adhere to the general liberal line of Trump’s electoral denialism being an inexcusable crime against the republic. Still, at one point in Fight they accidentally back up the argument that Trump sincerely held beliefs about the 2020 election’s illegitimacy by discussing how his staff had to spend months convincing him that early voting wasn’t fake and could turn into a substantial advantage for his 2024 campaign- which it did.

If there’s any explicit contrast made between the Trump and Democratic campaigns in Fight, it’s that while Trump could believe obviously wrong things, or have ridiculous expectations, there was a basic logic to his actions that at least made it possible for his aides to work with him and come up with a coherent strategy. In one humorous anecdote, Trump responds to a pitch about doing an interview with Theo Von by telling Alex Brusewitz to run it by his son Barron first. When they reach Barron  for comment, he endorses the Theo Von idea and tells his dad to interview with Adin Ross too.

This kind of lateral thinking is practically nonexistent in the Democrat side of the story. Indeed, at no point in Fight does it ever occur to anyone on the blue team to even attempt to ask a younger person what might or might not be a good idea to appeal to younger voters. Nancy Pelosi’s grandchildren make a brief, nameless appearance busing tables and washing dishes at Jon Bon Jovi’s Red Bank restaurant while Pelosi, wearing a lavender pantsuit, gossips about Biden’s future. Apparently this was a prize in some sort of charity auction? Fight doesn’t really explain any of this, not just because of its apparent irrelevance, but because the sheer casual absurdity of the metaphor explains everything on its own.

The Democrats were never really running a democratic campaign, as that term is generally understood, in that they were making an appeal to power based on their popular support. The first half of of Fight mostly just discusses the often absurd ways Democratic leaders tried to rationalize the idea of Biden stepping down after his disastrous debate without ever actually admitting that the President of the United States wasn’t physically or mentally up to doing the job he already had, and probably hadn’t been for quite some time.

The second-half transition to Kamala Harris becoming the nominee underscores this irony because she earns this position as successor mostly by refusing to speak out against the sitting President, making her the Democrat leader President Biden hated the least after all the rest of them spent a month trying to bully him into giving up his reelection bid without actually saying as much out loud. Harris then maintains this incoherent position even in the final stretch of the campaign when her unwillingness to say what, if anything, she would do as president that isn’t just the existing Biden policy starts to have a clear negative impact.

Jonathan Allen and Amies Parnes weren’t planning to write Fight from the outset, despite it being the obvious follow-up to their previous two collaborations. Their publisher only commissioned the book after the debate made it clear that a big story was breaking. Unfortunately, the retrospective narrative is, at times, a bit obvious. None of their sources give any comments suggesting that Biden’s reelection bid was a good idea, when surely, someone must have been making that argument at the time.

Which brings us back to that fascinating line. Kamala Harris had been gaslit too. But gaslit by who? She was, supposedly, in charge of the entire campaign. Sure, maybe some of her staff had been giving her bad data. But gaslighting, as admittedly useless as that word has become, generally refers to a malicious act by one person to manipulate another person into believing some patently untrue idea for personal benefit. None of the leaders of the Democratic Party actually benefited from any of this rhetoric. It made them look like hypocrites.

Biden himself may have believed he was fit to be president, but he clearly wasn’t capable of putting on this charade on his own. Fight discusses how Biden effectively destroyed the existing Democratic Party infrastructure to put his own people in there–a scandal that might have been of greater interest except that Harris ended up taking in all of Biden’s sycophants as her own campaign staff. Except that this time, there was no “Lucky” break.

The unlearned lessons from the 2024 election continue to be of distressing relevance. The Democratic Party stubbornly refuses to admit any fault, acting as if Trump is invincible when he quite literally lost an election only four years prior. The explicit unwillingness of Democrats to fire anyone, for any reason, has directly led to DOGE running roughshod over the government using the not-entirely-wrong justification that it’s impossible to get rid of dead weight any other way.

Books like Abundance try to make all this just seem like a messaging issue, when, as one source in Fight notes, Harris may well have won the election if they’d held it a month earlier because the seeming Biden emergency gave her a lot of slack with voters she probably never really deserved, and it only really started to go bad when the initial glow wore off and voters were expecting Harris to give some sort of explanation as to why she wanted to be president aside from sheer inertia.

This is the great absurdity of the Trump era. The longer it’s gone on, the less its apparent permanence seems to have anything to do with Trump himself than it does with Democrats deliberately using stupid strategies for the pettiest of personal campaigns because there are no mechanisms stopping them from doing so. Fight discusses the Trump assassination attempt at length and I think it’s fairly telling just how ridiculous this whole situation is that barely anything about that feels relevant anymore.