The Fight of His Life

From the New York Times bestselling author of The 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.

Autorentext
Chris Whipple is an author, political analyst, and Emmy Awardwinning documentary filmmaker. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and has contributed essays to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair. His first book, The Gatekeepers, an analysis of the position of White House Chief of Staff, was a New York Times bestseller. His follow-up, The Spymasters, was based on interviews with nearly every living CIA Director and was critically acclaimed. Whipple lives in New York City with his wife Cary.

Klappentext

From the New York Times bestselling author of The 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.

Zusammenfassung
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers comes a revelatory, news-making look at how President Joe Biden and his seasoned team have battled to achieve their agendabased on the author's extraordinary access to the White House during two years of crises at home and abroad.

Leseprobe
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 about everything.”

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’d laugh 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 for process: 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…