To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

After returning from a trip to Tel Aviv to demonstrate U.S. support for Israel’s war with Hamas, President Joe Biden used Thursday evening’s Oval Office address to make the case for sending wartime aid to Israel and continuing American support for Ukraine.

The president’s plan is complicated by events at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Legislating is at a standstill as House Republicans have yet to reach a consensus on who will be their next speaker.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more are Dana Bash, the chief political correspondent and anchor of Inside Politics With Dana Bash on CNN; Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future; Steve Inskeep, the host of Morning Edition on NPR and the author of Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America; and Nancy Youssef, a national-security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.

The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here, and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.

“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”

The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.

[Peter Wehner: The inflection point]

Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that a majority of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives from progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

“Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”

For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.

Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.

But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.

[Conor Friedersdorf: A collection of narratives on the Israel-Hamas war]

Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)

“A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.

Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.

Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.

When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”

Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.

[Read: Around the world, demonstrations of support, grief, and anger]

In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.

“Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.

As is generally the way, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.

The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.

The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”

What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.

The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war with Hamas and Ukraine in its war with Russia. The president is expected to ask Congress for emergency assistance to the two nations in a $100 billion spending package. But the speech was not primarily about money; it was about America’s teleology, about how Biden sees the role of the United States in a world that is fraying and aflame.

Biden used phrases loaded with meaning. America is “the arsenal of democracy,” he said, invoking a phrase from a 1940 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in case that wasn’t clear enough, Biden said America is “the essential nation” and the “indispensable nation.” It “holds the world together,” Biden said. Israel and Ukraine are 1,200 miles apart. The conflicts are quite different; Ukraine is battling a world power, and Israel a terrorist organization. But Biden twinned the two conflicts, presenting the outcome of these wars as vital to America’s national security.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

“History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” he said, while promising to keep American troops out of harm’s way. “They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

Biden displayed “a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from the president’s ordinarily flat and meandering speeches,” according to David Sanger of The New York Times. In an act of extraordinary solidarity, President Biden has traveled to both Israel and Ukraine in the midst of their wars. One gets the sense that Biden believes this isn’t just America’s moment; it is his moment. It is as if he has found his purpose.

President Biden’s speech illustrated the profound shifts we’re seeing in American politics and within the two major parties. The commander in chief Biden most sounded like was Ronald Reagan, using phrases such as “pure, unadulterated evil” to describe the actions of Hamas (Reagan described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”) and “beacon to the world” to describe America (Reagan often described the United States as a “shining city on a hill”).  

Meanwhile Republicans have become the more isolationist party, deeply wary of America providing moral leadership in the world. In last fall’s midterm elections, well over half of voters for Republican candidates—56 percent—said the U.S. should take a less active role in world affairs.

[From the December 2022 issue: A new theory of American power]

It is the American right, much more than the American left, that is disparaging of NATO, critical of aid to Ukraine, and appeasement-minded toward Russia. Donald Trump—the dominant and defining figure in the GOP—has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, among other brutal dictators, holding Putin up as a model and, at various points, denigrating America in the process. He even sided with Russian intelligence over U.S. intelligence at a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki.

And so it was a bit disorienting for some of us who are conservative and who were shaped by the Reagan era—and in my case, who worked as a young man in the Reagan administration—to see our foreign-policy principles championed last night not by the Republican Party but by the Democratic president, who spoke with impressive moral force and moral clarity. Our journey through the looking glass continues.

As his address to the nation from the Oval Office Thursday night underlined, President Joe Biden is expected to send a defense-appropriations request to Congress for perhaps as much as $100 billion to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and to improve U.S. border security. It’s a big request—and it will galvanize a debate about whether the United States is doing too much.

Existing critics of Ukraine aid are already complaining that to add an effort to resupply Israel will prove too crushing. Is that true?

Let’s carefully tally American resources and American commitments.

Thanks to its remarkable rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, the American economy will this year produce $27 trillion in goods and services. In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the U.S. spent about $850 billion of that $27 trillion on national defense. That rounds out at a little more than 3 percent of GDP. That’s only about half of the burden of defense spending that the U.S. shouldered during the final decade of the Cold War.

[Franklin Foer: Inside Biden’s ‘hug Bibi’ strategy]

To date, aid to Ukraine has cost a fraction of that percentage. By mid-September, the total value of the aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. amounted to about $75 billion. Nearly a third of that sum (about $23 billion) was the value of old equipment from Pentagon stockpiles, material that was on its way to becoming obsolete anyway. The remainder included funding U.S. government operations to support Ukraine—training, logistics, and so on—and direct assistance to the Ukrainian government.

If the president now asks for another $75 billion over the next two years, that will represent about a 4 percent share of the defense budget for that period—or roughly one-tenth of one penny for every dollar of national output. The United States should be able to cope.

And what about the Israeli piece of this budget request?

In normal years, U.S. assistance to Israel is worth about $3 billion. Almost all of that is spent by Israel to buy U.S.-made weapons and equipment. Israel is reportedly requesting an emergency supplement of $10 billion—in the larger scheme of things, a fraction of a fraction.

Nor will aid to Israel compete with the needs of Ukraine. Ukraine wants heavy equipment from the U.S. to fight conventional land battles. Kyiv needs fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, and ammunition, ammunition, and more ammunition. According to a senior Pentagon source, the Israeli emergency request involves very different items from the U.S. inventory: principally, precision-guided munitions for Israel’s air force, components for its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, and intelligence resources and advisers for its hostage-situation response. Israel is receiving some fighting vehicles and artillery shells, too, but on a completely different scale from anything Ukraine requires. Ukraine needs about 1.5 million shells a year; Israel wants a few thousand more shells on hand in case Hezbollah starts shooting from the Lebanon hills. Blasting away in Gaza would be brutal and futile.

The critics of American military-aid spending also grumble that its partners do not contribute enough. That image some Americans have of free-loading allies is false.

Total European Union contributions to Ukraine are roughly double the total of U.S. commitments. EU countries are providing many weapons systems, including eventually some two dozen F-16 fighters. They are also covering most of the cost of sustaining the Ukrainian economy.  

[Casey Michel: Make Russia pay]

Alongside the EU, the United Kingdom has spent $5.6 billion on military assistance to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. Japan’s multiyear commitment—mostly economic and humanitarian—will add up to about $7 billion. The Canadian commitment to Ukraine will total about $7 billion over the years 2022–26.

Aside from all of this, the U.S. still has spare capacity, and can deliver more inventory to Ukraine without any risk to its own national security. Of the 2,200 F-16 aircraft purchased by the United States since the 1970s, fewer than 900 still remain in service. The Air Force would dearly like to retire and replace 125 of those 900. Donating those 125 to Ukraine would accelerate the Air Force’s wished-for modernization programs.

Costs, of course, have to be measured against benefits. The money to Ukraine is buying a powerful reinforcement of peace in Europe and across the world. The money to Israel will buy a similar deterrent to rogue aggression in the Middle East.

President Biden issued a one-word caution to Hezbollah and Iran about exploiting Hamas’s aggression against Israel: “don’t.” That warning has been bolstered by sending two carrier groups and a deployment of Marines to the region. Biden’s admonition has even more force because of what the Iranians have seen in Ukraine: a global alliance defending a democratic ally in defiance of Russia’s energy embargoes, nuclear blackmail, and disinformation warfare.

Some in the U.S. foreign-policy community harbor a fantasy that the U.S. can enhance its credibility with China by abandoning Ukraine. (One such dreamer, Elbridge Colby, was treated to a glowing profile in Politico recently.) This is like suggesting that a business can improve its credit by defaulting on some of its debts. Ukraine’s self-defense has delivered a needed check to authoritarian aggressors all around the world.

[David Frum: What Ukraine needs now]

Democracy needs some wins against its most violent enemies. Ukraine and Israel both offer opportunities for the U.S. to realize valuable security gains without risking a single American soldier. Obviously, it’s important for American policy makers to proceed cautiously. Russia wields a nuclear deterrent. Gaza is a bad place to fight a ground war. But precisely by its generosity, the U.S. has earned the right to dissuade its partners from launching operations that seem ill-advised.

So what of the idea that the U.S. should back away from helping because it’s all too much trouble? Because the country that during the Cold War defended both Germany and Japan with its Army and Navy is now too feeble to aid two friendly democracies that ask only for material and technical assistance to defend themselves? Because a few dozen Republican House members and a handful of Republican senators are intimidated by Donald Trump and addled by social media?

For the U.S. to back away from its commitments for these reasons would be simply shameful.

The United States can succeed. The United States is succeeding. There’s never a good time to yield to bad-faith isolationism, but for a great nation animated by high ideals, this moment would be an especially bad time to do so.

President addresses US in rare Oval Office speech and explains why country should back Ukraine and Israel.

Last summer, a few weeks after Cassidy Hutchinson’s public testimony about Donald Trump’s response to his 2020 election loss, staffers on the January 6 committee sat down in a conference room at the O’Neill House Office Building with another big get: Jennifer Moore, the FBI administrator who oversaw intelligence in the bureau’s D.C. office in the lead-up to the Capitol attack.

Moore spent several hours talking with committee staffers who were trying to get to the bottom of why the federal government was so ill-prepared for the clear threat posed by thousands of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who thought January 6 was their one last shot to save the country.

A committee staffer tried to get Moore to concede something that could have been obvious to anyone with an internet connection in late 2020: Trump’s December 19 tweet—“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”—was an inflection point. This didn’t need to be a controversial view; public social-media posts made clear that the far right saw the tweet as “marching orders”; it sparked massive new interest in the events that were being planned that day. By the time of Moore’s interview in mid-2022, even though Trump’s tweet played a key role in many of the hundreds of criminal cases that the FBI had brought against Capitol rioters, Moore demurred.
“I will definitely say all rhetoric, again, increased as we got closer to January 6th,” Moore said. “On both sides,” Moore added, inadvertently echoing Trump’s infamous remark after the deadly neo-Nazi attack in Charlottesville in 2017. (Perhaps this is obvious, but whatever Democrats were saying, militant Joe Biden supporters were not, in fact, plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol.)

[Read: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Moore’s seemingly reflexive instinct to create parity where none exists encapsulates the challenges the bureau faces in combatting domestic extremism in the 21st century, something that I saw again and again while poring over thousands of pages of FBI documents, interview transcripts, and court records for my new book, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System.  

Nearly three years have passed since the January 6 attack. The January 6 committee was originally supposed to examine how the nation’s law-enforcement institutions had failed to plan for such an event. But Liz Cheney and the committee’s Democrats were determined to keep the public’s ire focused on the former president, and, as a result, the committee’s final report breezed past the issue. This is too bad, because the country deserves accountability. January 6 was a preventable tragedy, an onslaught that the United States government could have fended off had law enforcement sent a more rigorous warning to would-be rioters ahead of January 6, and had stronger security measures been put in place around the Capitol building.

There’s no single explanation for what former FBI Director James Comey called “a failure to see a threat that was in bright daylight.” Some of the contributing factors could have been pulled right from a dusty copy of the 9/11 Commission Report, though others are unique to the Trump presidency. I found five key themes while working on my book.

1. Right-leaning political sympathies and false equivalency

The FBI is a conservative-leaning organization generally, and, in some cases, home to election deniers, January 6 supporters, and even outright participants. An FBI employee was on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in a personal capacity; a former counterterrorism official allegedly entered the Capitol and then urged rioters to kill officers protecting the building; and a top FBI official was warned that “a sizable percentage” of FBI employees “felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” As one law-enforcement official diplomatically put it to me, there are “varying degrees of enthusiasm” for January 6 cases in FBI field offices across the country.

Unfortunately, those sympathies can inhibit the FBI’s pursuit of what is a significant domestic threat: right-wing extremism. Over the course of 10 years, from 2013 to 2022, 75 percent of the 444 people killed by extremists were killed by right-wing extremists, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League, and in 2022, all of the 25 extremist-related murders tracked by the ADL were committed by right-wing extremists. As the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor (and now federal judge) Thomas Cullen wrote in 2019, “White supremacy and far-right extremism are among the greatest domestic-security threats facing the United States.” The FBI, however, hesitates to speak that plainly and instead jams extremists from polar-opposite sides of the spectrum together into broad categories. For example, white supremacists and Black separatists are both part of “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism”; anarchists and militias are both part of “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” This approach may appease congressional appropriators, who can’t complain about the FBI singling out extremists on their preferred side of the aisle, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of which groups actually pose the deadlier threat to the public, nor does it help develop strategies for dealing with dissimilar movements.

2. Distraction from the Oval Office

Three days before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, on January 3, 2021, the Justice Department was worried about an insider threat. That Sunday afternoon, just before the two leaders of the Justice Department held a crucial conference call about law-enforcement planning for January 6, the DOJ environmental lawyer and election truther Jeffrey Clark told then–Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen that he was going to take Trump up on his offer. He’d be taking Rosen’s job, which Rosen had had only since former Attorney General Bill Barr’s resignation went into effect just before Christmas. Soon, the Justice Department's acting No. 2, Richard Donoghue, started removing the plaques off his wall and boxing up his office, figuring his boss was about to be fired, perhaps via Trump tweet. That evening saw the showdown at the White House, where Justice Department officials said they’d quit if Clark was installed. Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—the one in which Trump asked him to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the state—was playing on cable news near the Oval Office, according to Donoghue’s later testimony.

Had things gone slightly differently, Sunday, January 3, would have been an infamous day in American history, right up there with the Saturday Night Massacre of the Watergate era. But by joining forces and humiliating Clark in front of Trump—“You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office and we'll call you when there’s an oil spill?” Donoghue remembered telling Clark—the Justice Department leaders won, and Trump stood down, for the moment. The news came to the DOJ leaders via text and email. “Will call shortly, but we won,” Rosen wrote in a text at 9:03 p.m., less than 72 hours before the Capitol was breached. The top echelons of the Justice Department were thoroughly distracted. The department was preparing for the transition; an "outbriefing" session for political appointees was even set for 10 a.m. on January 6. The man in the White House, of course, had other plans.

3. Awful timing

The year 2020 wasn’t great for anyone, including FBI employees. Even in a good year, nobody in D.C. (journalists included) is firing on all cylinders during the weeks at the end of December. At the tail end of 2020, the event the intelligence analysts at the FBI were chiefly focused on after the holiday break was Inauguration Day, which, like other inaugurations, had been designated as a National Special Security Event and required coordination between numerous government entities.
Despite the holiday, the work wasn’t slowing down, and the FBI couldn’t seem to catch a break. On top of being worried that Trump was going to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and the acting leadership of the Justice Department, plus juggling vacation time, the FBI was responding to two major events. First was the massive SolarWinds hack, which one official told the Associated Press was looking like “the worst hacking case in the history of America” and which the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has since called “one of the most widespread and sophisticated hacking campaigns ever conducted against the federal government and private sector.” After the intrusion was detected in mid-November, the FBI spent December and early January dealing with the fallout, teaming up with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency  and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a “whole-of-government response to this significant cyber incident” in mid-December and notifying the private sector of the risks on December 21. In a joint statement on January 5, the government indicated that the “Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor” behind the attack was “likely Russian in origin.”
There was also a Christmas Day bombing in Nashville by a conspiracy theorist who believed that September 11 was an inside job. The FBI did what it does best after that attack: surged resources. The investigation involved “recovering more than 3,000 pounds of evidence from the blast site, combing through more than 2,500 tips, and conducting more than 250 interviews.” The response involved a total of 277 FBI employees, including “specialty units such as the Evidence Response Team, SWAT, Bomb Technicians, Crisis Negotiation, Behavioral Analysis, and Victim Assistance.” FBI headquarters sent personnel from a variety of teams, including the counterterrorism division, and 20 FBI field offices sent along personnel as well. Ultimately, the FBI determined that Anthony Quinn Warner’s actions were driven in part by “paranoia, long-held individualized beliefs adopted from several eccentric conspiracy theories, and the loss of stabilizing anchors and deteriorating interpersonal relationships”—a description that could well apply to many January 6 rioters.

4. Bureaucracy and outdated tech

The FBI was leaning on an outside vendor to help it track social-media rhetoric, but thanks to a lengthy bidding process and contracting change, the FBI lost access to that key social-media monitoring tool when the clock struck midnight and the calendar flipped to 2021. FBI personnel and the head of the FBI Washington Field Office raised the alarm days before January 6; the head of the office called it “extremely concerning” they didn’t have access to the tools they needed. “We need the sign ons this weekend to effectively do our jobs,” Steven D’Antuono wrote at 4 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. “I’ll cross my fingers and toes that the company that we are paying for a service starting January 1st can get us sign ons for their service by this weekend. Doesn’t make sense to me.” But the “hope” was that the new tool would be available “before Jan. 6 and definitely before Jan. 20,” another official told him.

The FBI has never been at the front of the pack on technology. In his book about the lead-up to September 11,  The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright notes that by the turn of the century, church groups wouldn’t even accept the bureau’s old computers as donations. Up until a few years ago, FBI emails were formatted “@ic.fbi.gov.” That didn’t stand for “intelligence community”; it stood for “internet café,” from the days of dial-up and AOL. If you read through thousands of pages of FBI documents, it’s tough to square phrases such as “Sent from Samsung Email” and “Apologies if the formatting is off, I am on Office 365” with the outlandish claims that January 6 was an FBI setup. The vibes are much more The Office than CSI.

The FBI has to deal with an enormous number of incoming digital tips (“I wish you could see the volume,” a former top official told the January 6 committee), and that’s unlikely to slow down anytime soon. Most of them are handled by the National Threat Operations Center, in West Virginia; FBI documents released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show a massive spike in complaints from the public the day before January 6. Figuring out how to respond to the quantity of raw material is a challenge. When should federal agents take action? What’s just “keyboard bravado”?

Making sure the FBI—with its comparatively low salary scale—is able to recruit and maintain the tech-savvy workforce it needs to take on the key challenges of the 21st century is a major looming issue at the bureau, but one that isn’t getting the type of attention it needs from lawmakers.

5. Donald Trump

The FBI is part of the executive branch, meaning, ultimately, that Trump oversaw it. By the end of 2020, the bureau had been under his sustained attacks for years. He’d fired James Comey and made clear he wasn’t fond of Wray, especially because Wray accurately described anti-fascism as more of an ideology than a group. White House lawyers had to advise Trump against firing Wray at the end of 2020. In that environment, who wanted to be the person who wrote a memo saying the president’s event posed a national-security threat? There was a constant fear of leaks—that a poorly phrased email about January 6 could set off a political disaster, characterized as just more evidence of the work of the so-called deep state. One email that circulated within the FBI Washington Field Office just before January 6 indicated that the office would “not be releasing anything” about January 6 to anyone beyond its executive management.

Trump had telegraphed his plan to claim election fraud for months, but the bureau couldn’t be honest about the foreseeable consequences of the commander in chief telling his millions of supporters that the election had been stolen. Shortly before the election, and not long after Trump told the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” the FBI ran a “red cell” experiment meant to map out how extremists might respond to claims that the election was stolen. A summary of the analysis I recently obtained through the FOIA shows the bureau predicted that the most likely scenario was that extremists would be “very willing to take action” in response to a disputed election, but that “law enforcement preemption,” as well as “disorganization” among extremist groups, “likely would hinder widespread violence.” The redacted copy of the analysis doesn’t contemplate the role that a conspiracy-minded president with a massive digital bully pulpit could play in bringing that coalition together at a set date and time.

Reports released this year both by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and by the GAO have examined some of the law-enforcement-intelligence failures before the Capitol attack, and the Justice Department’s inspector general is working on an investigation into what went wrong.

[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 Committee]

The FBI has instituted some internal reforms since January 6, increasing “focus on swift information sharing” and “improved automated systems,” but there hasn’t been a serious legislative effort to fix existing issues and ensure that a failure like this doesn’t happen again. Instead, Republicans have gone after the FBI for prosecuting January 6 cases; some members have even supported a “fedsurrection” narrative positing that a diabolical FBI masterminded the attack, creating a false flag event to make Trump supporters look bad. It’s a theory that fundamentally breaks what is supposed to be a core conservative belief—that big government is bloated and inefficient—and instead posits that the federal government is full of super geniuses with staggering competency who can pull off a massive scheme and leave no traces, even when the executive branch was being run by Donald Trump and the FBI had a large contingent of Trump supporters within the bureau. (There is no credible evidence to support such a theory.)

For now, the quickest summary of what went wrong might just have come from Trump, who hopped on the phone with the DOJ’s Rosen and Donoghue 10 days before the Capitol attack, when he was encouraging them to use the Justice Department’s powers to overturn the election.

“You guys,” Trump said, “may not be following the internet the way I do.”

On a Thursday morning in April, I met with Vice President Kamala Harris at Number One Observatory Circle, the Victorian mansion that, for the past two and a half years, she and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, have called home. She can be a striking presence when she walks into a room, with a long stride and an implacable posture that make her seem taller than she is (about 5 foot 2). By the time I saw Harris at the residence, I had already traveled with her to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, and Reno, Nevada, as well as to Africa, trips on which she had carried herself with ease and confidence.

Ease and confidence have not been the prevailing themes of Harris’s vice presidency. Her first year on the job was defined by rhetorical blunders, staff turnover, political missteps, and a poor sense among even her allies of what, exactly, constituted her portfolio. Within months of taking office, President Joe Biden was forced to confront a public perception that Harris didn’t measure up; ultimately, the White House issued a statement insisting that Biden did, in fact, rely on his vice president as a governing partner. But Harris’s reputation has never quite recovered.

Harris is intensely private, so I was somewhat surprised to be invited to her home. The residence had been redecorated, and in keeping with past practice the work was done without fanfare. There have been no photo spreads, and the designer, Sheila Bridges, signed a nondisclosure agreement. But Harris seemed to enjoy showing me around. In the turret room, she pointed to the banquette seating built along the curve. (“I just love circles,” she said.) She gestured at some of the art she’d brought in, on loan from various galleries and collections, describing each piece in terms of the artist’s background rather than its aesthetic qualities—Indian American woman, African American gay man, Japanese American. “So you get the idea,” she said. We moved into the library, with its collection of books devoted to the vice presidency. (Who knew there were so many?) The green-striped wallpaper pattern that the Bidens had favored when they lived here was gone. Now there was bright, punch-colored wallpaper—chosen, Harris explained, in order to “redefine what power looks like.”

She said this with a laugh, but it was a studied phrase. Redefining what power looks like has been the theme of every chapter of Kamala Harris’s political career. She is the U.S.-born daughter of immigrants—her mother a cancer researcher from India, her father an economist from Jamaica. As Biden’s running mate, she became the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American to be elected vice president. Before that, she was the first South Asian American and only the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Before that, she was the first woman, Black American, and South Asian American to serve as attorney general of her native California. Before that, she was the first Black woman in California to be elected as a district attorney.

[Jemele Hill: Kamala Harris makes history]

When Biden underwent a colonoscopy in November 2021, Harris served as acting president, becoming the first woman (and first South Asian American) to officially wield presidential authority. If vice presidents have historically been tormented by the question of legacy—compelled to wonder not how they will be remembered but whether they will be remembered at all—Harris was assured of a mandatory nod in the history books the moment she was sworn in.

But after nearly three years in office, the symbolic fact of Harris’s position has proved more resonant than anything she has actually done with it. From almost the beginning, Harris’s vice presidency has unfolded in a series of brutal headlines: “Exasperation and Dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ Frustrating Start as Vice President” (CNN, November 2021). “A Kamala Harris Staff Exodus Reignites Questions About Her Leadership Style—And Her Future Ambitions” (The Washington Post, December 2021). “New Book Says Biden Called Harris a ‘Work in Progress’ ” (Politico, December 2022). “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting” (The New York Times, February 2023).

The hazy nature of Harris’s responsibilities has made for easy satire—“White House Urges Kamala Harris to Sit at Computer All Day in Case Emails Come Through,” read an early Onion headline. Clips of Harris sound bites gone wrong have ricocheted across social media, and not just right-wing sites. A Daily Show feature in October 2022 paired clips from various Harris speeches (“When we talk about the children of the community, they are a children of the community …”) with clips from the fictional vice president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on Veep (“Well, we are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states”).

In June 2023, an NBC News poll put Harris’s approval rating at 32 percent. While Biden’s own approval numbers, in the low 40s, are hardly inspiring, the percentage of those who disapprove of Harris’s performance is higher than for any other vice president in the history of the poll.

Ordinarily, as people around Harris like to remind reporters, a vice president’s approval rating does not warrant notice. But if Biden—already the country’s oldest president—wins reelection, he would begin a second term at age 82. And although Democrats recoil at any mention of Biden’s mortality, it’s hardly a coincidence that, as the 2024 campaign gathers pace, people have begun to contemplate the possibility that Harris could become president. In the campaign’s announcement video and at events across the country for the past few months, Harris has been enlisted more prominently as a spokesperson for the administration’s accomplishments—more visible, often, than the president himself. But unlike Biden, Harris does not simply need Americans to agree that she deserves four more years in her current job. She needs them to trust that she is ready, should the moment require it, to step into his.

Republicans may offer a mandatory “God forbid” when raising the prospect of some presidential health crisis, but they are already pushing the idea that “a vote for President Biden is a vote for President Harris.” They are doing so in large part because they see her as a more inviting target than the president himself: a woman of color whose word-salad locutions turn themselves into campaign ads, and whose outspoken advocacy on social issues makes her easier to paint as an ideologue lying in wait.

Harris and I talked at the residence for an hour. Toward the end of the conversation, she patted the cushion between us. “No reporter has sat here ever,” she said. It was a small moment, but it seemed to represent a recognition that something had to change—if not about the way Harris actually does her job, then about the way she presents herself, and her role, in public.

Even today, people who have worked for Harris make a point of telling you where they were during the Lester Holt interview. Usually, it is because they want to make clear that they were not involved.

In June 2021, at the end of a two-day trip to Guatemala, the vice president sat down with the NBC anchor to discuss Biden’s immigration agenda. Harris had recently become the administration’s lead on the so-called root-causes element of border policy, working with Central American countries to alleviate the violent and impoverished conditions that lead many migrants to flee north to the U.S. in the first place. The questions should have been easily anticipated—such as whether Harris had any plans to visit the border itself, where crossings had surged. Yet when Holt did ask that question, Harris threw up her hands in evident frustration. “At some point, you know, I—we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole—this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt corrected her: “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris became defensive. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” she snapped. “I don’t understand the point you’re making.”

The exchange became the subject of headlines and late-night monologues. (“Well, that escalated quickly,” Jimmy Fallon said on his show the same night.) Afterward, Harris shied away from the camera for months.

For many Americans, the Holt interview was the first real exposure to Harris as vice president. She had spent the better part of her career as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who won her first election—district attorney of San Francisco, in 2003—by positioning herself as a pragmatic reformer. As California’s attorney general, she targeted transnational gangs and cartels and won billions in extra relief from big banks at the center of the foreclosure crisis. She had been the state’s junior senator for just over two years when she launched a bid for the presidency, in 2019, buoyed by the brief but bright flashes of stardom she’d earned from her tough, courtroom-style questioning of Trump-administration officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions (“I’m not able to be rushed this fast; it makes me nervous,” Sessions complained to her at one point), and of the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And although she was an early favorite for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, raising millions in donations as she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump,” her campaign fell apart before the Iowa caucus, beset by uneven messaging, disorganization, and low morale.

Throughout her time in national politics, Harris has repeated some advice imparted to her by her mother: “You don’t let people tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.” Yet a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms. The result, in Harris’s first months as vice president, was that high-profile mistakes assumed the devastating weight of first impressions. Verbal fumbles (“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day”) became memes and were anthologized online. Shortly after the Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to various news outlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance. In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides. Her current chief of staff, Lorraine Voles—formerly Al Gore’s communications director, who has expertise in crisis management—was brought on initially to help with, as Voles put it, “organizational” issues with the team still in place.

[Read: The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment]

Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff, told me that after her initial missteps, Harris became highly risk-averse: “She’s always nervous that if she does something that doesn’t go well, she’s setting us back.” David Axelrod, a former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, noticed the same trait. “I think it’s one of the things that plagued her in the presidential race,” he told me. “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” He went on: “People can read that. When you’re playing at that level, people can read that.”

Those closest to Harris have tried to make sense of why the vice president’s positive qualities—her intelligence, her diligence, her integrity—have failed to register with Americans. It is impossible, of course, to talk about perceptions of Harris without laying some of the blame on racism and sexism. The briefest glance at the toxic comments about Harris on social media reveals the bigotry that motivates some of her most fervent detractors. But the vice president’s allies also acknowledge that she has struggled to make an affirmative case for herself. Judging from what has gone viral online, she is better known for her passion for Venn diagrams than for any nugget of biography; right-wing personalities enjoy mocking this predilection almost as much as they enjoy mocking the way she laughs.

Harris may understand intellectually the imperative to seem “relatable” to a broad audience—to condense her background to a set of compelling SparkNotes to be recited on cue—but she hasn’t made a habit of doing so. In smaller settings, she can be funny at her own expense. When I asked her what advice she would give to a successor, she referred back to some of those social-media reviews: “Don’t read the comments.” In our conversation at the residence, she touched briefly on how her “first woman” status shapes even the most workaday elements of the job: “I’m not going to tell you who said to me—it’s a previous president of the United States. He said, ‘Wow, women—I get up, I go work out, I jump in the shower, and I’m out the door. You guys …’ ” (I suspect she was quoting Obama, a friend of hers who has spoken about his efficient morning routine.) Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.

But she prefers a discreet distance from topics like these. A friend of Harris’s advised me before our first interview to avoid “small talk” or “diving immediately into personal matters.” The friend explained: “She appreciates the respect in that way.” Minyon Moore, a Democratic strategist with long-standing ties to Harris, made a related point: “She’s not a person—which I kind of like, but it doesn’t do her any good—she’s not a person that’s going to brag on herself. In fact, she’s very uncomfortable, say, beating her own chest. She just wasn’t raised that way.” Lateefah Simon, a former MacArthur fellow and now a candidate for Congress, was in her mid-20s when Harris hired her to run a program for young people convicted of nonviolent felonies, mostly involving drugs. Simon remembers Harris telling her she could either stand outside with a bullhorn or come push for change from the inside. “If you know Kamala Harris, she’s stern—she was a stern 38-year-old,” Simon recalled. But she could also be more than that: Harris gave Simon her first suit after she showed up on day one in Puma sweats.

Harris in 1997, when she was a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, California (Mary F. Calvert / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News / Getty)

Nearly three years after Harris’s swearing-in, her current and former staff still seem to be unearthing pertinent elements of her life story. Twice while I was reporting this article, aides highlighted an experience in Harris’s adolescence—one that had informed her decision to become a prosecutor—that they’d learned about only after joining her team. In high school, a friend confided in Harris that she was being molested by a family member, so Harris insisted that the friend move in with her own family (and she did). The outrage Harris felt in that moment would help define her path to the Alameda County district attorney’s office, where much of her work as a deputy involved prosecuting sex crimes against children.

I understood why her aides wanted me to hear that story, which is not widely known. I wondered why—when I’d asked about her decision to become a prosecutor—Harris hadn’t mentioned it herself. When we spoke at the residence, she did acknowledge the “request, sometimes the demand,” for personal revelation. “I guess it’s a bit outside of my comfort level,” Harris said, “because for me, it really is about the work. You know, I am who I am. I am who I am. And I think I’m a pretty open book, but I am who I am.” She went on a little longer, making clear that she understands that people want to know more. And then, in a softer tone, she said: “And I just, you know, yeah. I don’t know what to say about that.”

But what is “the work”? For the first time in her career, Harris holds a job devoid of any clear benchmarks of success. She was a transformational figure by the mere fact of her election, but the office to which she was elected doesn’t lend itself to transformational leadership.

After settling into Observatory Circle, Harris made a point of gathering historians for dinners—to discuss not just American democracy but also the history of the vice presidency itself. “You’re not supposed to be visible,” Heather Cox Richardson, who attended one dinner, told me, referring to the nature of the vice president’s job. “So there’s that really fine tightrope you walk, between how do you make people understand that you’re qualified without looking like you’re unqualified because you don’t understand your role.”

Neither Biden nor Harris arrived in Washington with a particular vision for Harris’s vice presidency. Harris had issues in which she was interested—racial justice, climate change, gun violence, maternal mortality—and as vice president she has explored these and others. But America imposed its own urgent agenda: Getting the pandemic under control absorbed much of everyone’s attention. With a 50–50 partisan split in the Senate, Harris was also compelled to spend much of her time in her old place of work, exercising the vice president’s constitutional duty to cast the deciding vote in the case of a tie. “We couldn’t make plans for me to be outside of D.C. for at least four days of the workweek,” she recalled.

More fundamentally, Biden and Harris came into office with few instructive models for their partnership, despite Biden having once held the job himself. For nearly half a century, with occasional exceptions, the vice president has been a creature of the capital. The president, in contrast, has been a relative outsider. Walter Mondale, the archetype of the modern American vice president, had 12 years in the Senate under his belt when he was sworn in. He became Jimmy Carter’s anchor to Washington. George H. W. Bush did the same for Ronald Reagan, as did Al Gore for Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney for George W. Bush, Joe Biden for Barack Obama, and Mike Pence for Donald Trump. But Harris and Biden flipped the script: a comparative newcomer serving as vice president to a man who’d launched his Senate career before she reached her tenth birthday.

[Read: The long arc of Joe Biden]

In our interviews, Harris spoke of her relationship with Biden largely in generalities. When I asked how she and the president complement each other, she said, “Well, first of all, let me just tell you, we really like each other,” and then went on to talk about shared values and principles. When I asked Harris what aspects of her skill set Biden depends on, she was more direct: “You’ll have to ask him.” (When I did, a spokesperson for Biden sent this statement: “Kamala Harris is an outstanding vice president because she’s an outstanding partner. She asks the hard questions, thinks creatively, stays laser-focused on what we’re fighting for, and works her heart out for the American people. She inspires Americans and people around the world who see her doing her job with skill and passion and dream bigger for themselves about what’s possible. I trust her, depend on her, admire her. And I’m proud and grateful to have her by my side.”)

Current and former aides to both say Harris and Biden have a good friendship. The president made the relationship a priority early on, setting up weekly lunches with Harris, like the ones he himself had valued with Obama. She still has lunch with him, she says, “when he’s not traveling, when I’m not traveling.” Given that Harris loves to cook—and regularly has friends and family over for meals—I asked whether she and her husband had hosted the Bidens for dinner. She said that they hadn’t, and seemed momentarily stuck in a feedback loop: “We have a plan to do it, but we have to get a date. But he and I have a plan, we have a plan to do it. And yeah, no, we actually have a plan to do it.”

As vice president, Harris has been unfailingly loyal to Biden. For West Wing staff, especially at the beginning, this was no small thing. During Harris’s vetting for the job, some of those close to Biden—reportedly including his wife, Jill—struggled with the memory of her sharp attacks on him during the presidential primary. In a televised debate, Harris had brought up the subject of Biden’s past opposition to busing, leading to one of the most withering exchanges of the race. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris told Biden. “And that little girl was me.”

Perhaps in recognition of this history, Harris has been an unswerving advocate of Biden and his policy priorities. Ultimately, she told me, that is what she sees as the core of her mandate as vice president. Building out the rest of the mandate has proved more complicated.

The path to the Lester Holt interview began with tension over Harris’s policy portfolio. During one of the administration’s early multiagency meetings about the surge of unlawful crossings at the Mexican border, Biden was impressed as Harris outlined ideas for engaging the Central American countries that many of the migrants were coming from. According to Ron Klain, the president turned to Harris and said, “Well, why don’t you do that?”—meaning, become the point person on the morass of root-cause elements. Harris approached the chief of staff after the meeting. “And she said,” as Klain recalled, “ ‘Well, I wasn’t really looking for that assignment—my idea was, this is what we should do, and someone else should do it.’ ” Klain told Harris he understood but, as vice president, Biden had worked on this aspect of immigration policy for Obama, and they needed her to take it on as well.

It wasn’t that Harris lacked relevant experience; as attorney general of California, she had worked extensively with law enforcement in Mexico on drug and human trafficking. But the politics of the issue were radioactive. Harris knew this, and so did Klain. “It was obviously a controversial assignment,” he acknowledged to me. “It wasn’t necessarily anyone’s idea of a glory assignment.” (Asked about this, the vice president’s office responded that Harris had “plunged into the issue with vigor.”) Harris broke the news of the task to her staff on a mordant note, opening a meeting with the announcement that she was “going to oversee the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a person who was in the room, then dialing back to the slightly less grim reality.

As Klain saw it, Biden intended the appointment—to the same role he had once held—as a show of respect. But it also suggested obliviousness to Harris’s need, early in her term, for a measure of stability and success. Of course, as the Holt interview showed, Harris could make the task harder all on her own. Republican lawmakers and Fox News personalities relished the prospect of pinning the border crisis on Harris. She may have been responsible for just one sliver of U.S. policy, but they used her proximity to border issues to fuel the image of Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”

[Read: Conflict between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is inevitable]

In the first year of his presidency, Biden did little to present Harris as essential to the administration; neither did the Democratic Party more broadly. Indeed, there was a sense that Harris might be a liability more than anything else. Less than two weeks into office, Harris appeared on a West Virginia news station to pitch the Biden administration’s coronavirus stimulus package—which Joe Manchin, the state’s conservative Democratic senator, was not yet sold on. In an interview on the same station the next day, Manchin said he was shocked that Harris had given him no notice of the appearance. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “That’s not a way of working together.” Later that year, as my colleague Franklin Foer has reported, Biden invited Manchin to the Oval Office to discuss the stimulus package; Harris was there initially, but after pleasantries was sent on her way. Biden had once said that Harris’s would be “the last voice in the room” during important conversations. Not this time.

Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, as they arrived in Accra, Ghana, in March 2023 (Ernest Ankomah / Getty)

In June 2021, Biden asked Harris to take the lead on voting rights for the administration. The House had recently passed the For the People Act—a massive overhaul of election law that addressed voter access, gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other matters—and Democratic leaders were eager to see movement in the Senate. That was unlikely. Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, promised that no Republican would support the bill; not all Democrats were on board either. The legislation would likely die by filibuster—a procedure that Biden, despite calls from many in his party, was almost certainly not going to try to undermine.

Harris’s allies would later characterize voting rights as one of those impossible issues—intractable is the word they often use—that the president had saddled her with. Yet it was Harris herself who had lobbied for the assignment. Her personal background made her a natural spokesperson, and as attorney general of California, she had signed on to an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the protections against discrimination in the Voting Rights Act—the protections eventually struck down in Shelby County v. Holder. But the bill’s death by filibuster was virtually inevitable. And Harris didn’t do much to stave it off.

Harris’s aides once described her to reporters as potentially a key emissary for the administration in Congress—helping corral votes by way of “quiet Hill diplomacy.” But she lacked the deep relationships needed to exert real influence. Congressional officials told me that Harris rarely engaged the more persuadable holdouts on either side of the aisle. At a key moment in the negotiations, Biden went to talk with the two resistant Democrats, Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. Harris did not go with him. A White House official declined to get into details and said only that Harris was “interested and engaged” in conversations with Democratic lawmakers during this period. Harris shifted the terms of the discussion when I asked how her Senate background had proved useful in the administration’s push for legislation: “I mean, I think the work we have to do is really more in getting folks to speak loudly with their feet through the election cycle”—an unusual image, though the point was clear enough: Electing more Democrats might be more effective than trying to twist more arms.

For now, Senate Democrats are not fighting for time with Harris when she’s on the Hill. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a Democratic office that actually engages with her or her team on a regular basis,” one Democratic senator’s chief of staff told me. Traditionally, this person said, officials from the executive branch who visit the Capitol are cornered by lawmakers hoping to get their priorities before the president. But few people are “scrambling to make alliances” with Harris—not because of any dislike, as this person and other congressional officials told me, but simply because of uncertainty about the nature of her role. “In her case,” the chief of staff said, “it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, good to see you.’ And that’s kind of the end of it.”

This past spring, I traveled with Harris to Los Angeles, where she was scheduled to appear on Jennifer Hudson’s daytime talk show. When Hudson asked Harris what she missed most about her old life, before the White House, the vice president replied, “Have you watched The Godfather ?” I was in the greenroom with her staff as they looked apprehensively at the screen, wondering where their boss was going with this. Harris went on to describe the scene in which Michael Corleone is out for a quiet walk in Sicily with his fiancée, “and then the shot pans out, and the whole village is on the walk with them.”

There’s no escaping the reality that her every move is probed and dissected. During our conversation at the residence, Harris pointed to the veranda. “Sometimes in the summer, I’ll come and sit out with my binders and a cup of tea, and it’s just really nice and quiet,” she said. It wasn’t until later, when I listened again to the tape of the conversation, that I remembered what she’d said next: “You almost forget that there are 5,000 people around here.”

Having worked in politics and government for the better part of her life, Harris is accustomed to a certain amount of scrutiny. But in her past jobs—as a prosecutor, as attorney general—people were looking at her actual accomplishments. That was how it seemed to her, at least. A friend of Harris’s told me that her professional yardstick was “outcome driven.” Campaigning for district attorney of San Francisco, Harris criticized the incumbent’s low conviction rate for felonies; running later for reelection, she talked about how she had improved it by 15 percentage points. Communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.

This is still, in some ways, how Harris tends to perceive her job. She is always asking aides to get to the point: Show me the data; show me the metrics. And for some things, this works. But success in national politics involves gauzier, more emotional elements. It’s not an accident that the single utterance by Harris that most people can call to mind—“That little girl was me”—drew on searing personal experience.

Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.

During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis. Her baroque response began: “The way I think about this moment is that I do believe it to be a transformational moment. But in order for us to truly achieve that capacity, it’s going to require all to be involved … and I will say, on behalf of the administration, a whole-of-government approach to understanding the excitement that we should all feel about the opportunity of this moment, and then also thinking of it in a way that we understand the intersection between so many movements that have been about a fight for justice and how we should see that intersection, then, in the context of this moment … And so I’m very excited about this moment.”

This is not Churchill. It’s not even Al Gore. Only when Harris assumed the role of interrogator herself did she seem to find her rhythm, pressing the moderators on the stage—two scientists—to discuss their personal journey toward an interest in climate issues. She then leveraged one moderator’s story to explain the administration’s plan to replace lead pipes across the country—using $15 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal, one of the Biden administration’s marquee victories. The communities that have been suffering from contamination “have been fighting for years and years and years,” Harris noted. “It didn’t take a science degree for them to know what was happening to their children.” The audience responded as if at a church service, with murmurs of affirmation.

Hillary Clinton told me that she has met with Harris at the White House and the vice president’s residence, and has talked with her numerous times by phone. “I’ve tried to be as helpful and available to her as possible,” Clinton said, adding, “It’s a tough role.” She noted that Harris isn’t a “performance” politician, a comment she intended not as a criticism but as an acknowledgment that Harris’s skills mainly lie elsewhere. (Clinton isn’t a performance politician either.) Harris doesn’t dispute the point: “My career was not measured by giving lovely speeches,” she told me.

Harris communicates most effectively when she can shift the focus away from herself. The first two conversations I had with the vice president, both while traveling with her, felt stilted and strained, as if I were tiptoeing around glass. But at the residence, alone, Harris was warm, inviting, at times even maternal. “You’re newly married,” she said. (“Yes,” I responded, though it wasn’t a question.) “Pay attention to your marriage,” she counseled. “Friendships, marriage require that you pay attention. Because life has a way of sweeping you up.”

Harris has configured many of her public events to resemble a back-and-forth conversation rather than a standard Q&A: She likes talking with people. The grassroots settings that Harris enjoys represent a mode of retail politics that rarely grabs national attention. But such events have given her a good read on what voters care about. They have also allowed her to inhabit her own space. As Klain observed, in Washington, you’re “just the vice president.” In the rest of the country, you’re “the vice president.”

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the abortion protections embodied in Roe v. Wade, Harris had a strong sense of American public opinion on the issue. Amid a crush of headlines predicting a so-called red wave in the upcoming midterm elections—with the economy as the central issue—Harris was steadfast in her view that abortion rights would shape the contest. She spent much of 2022 on the road, hosting conversations on reproductive rights in red and blue states alike. Women, she told me, “won’t necessarily talk loudly” about an issue like abortion. “But they will vote on it.” In this respect, Harris understood the mood of the country, and the potential impact at the ballot box, better than most people in Washington. In the midterms, the Democrats did far better than expected, even winning a majority in the Senate; there was no red wave. Harris has continued to travel and talk about abortion rights ever since. It is a central issue for the Democratic base and one that Biden—a devout Catholic who, in his own words, isn’t “big on” abortion—has been reluctant to press himself.

Harris marking the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade at an event in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2023 (Aileen Perilla / Redux)

Fighting Dobbs will be a long battle. But it’s the kind Harris may be suited for. In one of our conversations, she spoke about “the significance of the passage of time”—a line that featured in one of her more unwieldy speeches as vice president. I remember steadying myself when the phrase surfaced. But what followed was a revealing commentary about the diligence and patience that are required to produce real change. Harris told me about a commencement speech she had given at the law school of UC Berkeley. She spoke to the new graduates about Brown v. Board of Education—about how, after the ruling, integration largely took place on a creeping, county-by-county basis, and only in response to continual pressure. Exerting that pressure meant building a legal foundation, erecting a structure brick by brick, and laboring over the details, all in return for progress that was often measured in inches. This is a truth, Harris noted, that Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley all knew. “And I just got up there and I was like, ‘You want to be a lawyer?’ ” she recalled. If you do, she told them, then you must learn to “embrace the mundane.”

She laughed at the memory of that line. “And the parents are like, Ooh, this is good,” she recalled. “And the kids are like, Oh, fuck.”

Harris’s engagement with abortion rights has broken through to voters more than anything else in her vice presidency, according to the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. But Harris has been effective in another arena—diplomacy—that to the public is hardly visible at all.

During his two terms as vice president, Joe Biden traveled to 57 countries—and before that, as a senator, he had decades to acquire experience abroad. In the past two years, Harris has traveled to 19 countries, including France, Germany, Poland, Guatemala, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Indonesia. She has met with 100 or so foreign leaders. They have tended to appreciate, as more than one White House official told me, how fact-based and direct she is. She has “very little patience,” one of them said, for the euphemisms and platitudes of routine diplomacy. Harris’s risk aversion appears to stop at the water’s edge.

Her first major diplomatic test came during a five-day trip to France in November 2021. For some time, Harris had been considering an invitation to attend the Paris Peace Forum, whose purpose was to discuss global inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. But in the weeks before the event, relations between Washington and Paris had been pitched into tumult after the announcement of a lucrative joint U.S.-British submarine deal with Australia that nullified France’s own submarine deal with Australia. French President Emmanuel Macron was furious, recalling his ambassador from Washington; Biden soon admitted that his handling had been “clumsy.” For Harris, the trip to Paris went from optional to crucial.

In front of the cameras, Harris and Macron both said what they were expected to say about a positive long-term bilateral future. The atmosphere was one of chilly civility. But behind the scenes, Harris was helping lay the groundwork for cooperation on the looming crisis in Ukraine. She used her nearly two-hour meeting with Macron at the Élysée Palace to present an array of U.S. intelligence. Harris urged the French president to take seriously the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Three months later, Biden asked Harris to represent the administration at the high-visibility Munich Security Conference. It was a sign of Biden’s confidence—on a personal level (Biden had attended the conference many times) and also because of the timing. The U.S. now knew that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent, and Harris was tasked with helping press allies and partners to develop a coordinated response. Five days before the invasion, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to share U.S. intelligence and plans for military support. Publicly, Zelensky still seemed uncertain about Russia’s intentions and the scale of the threat. “The vice president directly and very clearly conveyed to Zelensky and his team that this was going to happen,” an official on the trip told me, “and they should really be planning on that basis and not waste any time.”

Harris returned to the Munich Security Conference this past February. Speaking for the administration, she formally declared the U.S. view that Russia had committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.

A month later, I joined Harris on a multicountry tour of Africa. China’s deepening presence on the continent provided the geopolitical backdrop. But Harris was bringing with her more than $7 billion in commitments, largely from the private sector, to promote climate-resilience initiatives, money she had raised herself through months of tree-shaking phone calls to companies and individuals. The trip was a seven-day sprint, and logistically taxing. On one occasion, the American advance team had to upgrade an entire road from dirt to gravel; the vice president’s Secret Service code name may be “Pioneer,” but there are limits to what her motorcade can handle.

In Cape Coast, Ghana, Harris walked through the Door of No Return, where enslaved people had taken their final steps in Africa before being forced onto ships. She discarded her prepared remarks—something she had almost never done before—and spoke powerfully about the legacy of the diaspora in the Americas. In Lusaka, Zambia, she was driven to the rural outskirts of the capital to visit Panuka Farm, powered entirely by renewable energy. The vice president had spent time on a farm as a child; wearing jeans and Timberlands, she seemed at home inside the netted enclosures of sweet peppers and iceberg lettuce. Washington felt very far away.

Harris’s allies touted the Africa trip as a historic effort to deepen ties with the fast-growing continent. But it hardly registered back home. Terrance Woodbury is a Democratic pollster who focuses on young and minority voters; he saw the Africa trip as a “pivot” in terms of Harris’s self-presentation. Yet when I asked whether the trip had made any difference politically, he said, simply, “No.”

The trip also offered a reminder of Harris’s ongoing struggle when it comes to telling her own story—and of the Veep comparison. The vice president’s visit to Zambia had been billed as a kind of homecoming. As a young girl, Harris spent time in Lusaka with her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, who had been dispatched there in the 1960s from India to advise Zambia’s first independent government on refugee resettlement. Now, decades later, she was returning to Zambia as one of the most prominent public figures in the world. Harris’s scheduled stop at her grandfather’s old home in the capital, where she was expected to speak about his work and how his career as a civil servant had shaped her own ambitions, promised to be a special moment.

Instead, dozens of reporters and others looked on as Harris laughed somewhat awkwardly in front of a concrete-and-stucco office building. Greeting her near the doorway was a U.S.-embassy official, who explained that, after a year of combing through public records, researchers had managed to locate the plot of land on which Gopalan’s house had stood. The house itself, however, had been replaced by the headquarters of a Zambian financial-services group. Seeming not to know what else to do, Harris accepted an offer to tour the building. Reporters and cameramen, who had been anticipating a press conference at the end of the event, were ushered away. When I asked why the press conference had been scrapped, an aide said, “She needed a private moment.” Life has a way of sweeping you up.

My conversation with Harris at the residence came three weeks after our return from Africa. She took me through her herb garden, just off the driveway, crouching to examine the state of her oregano, dill, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Washington’s springtime pollen was at its worst, and my eyes were red-rimmed and watery as we made our way inside. After finding a box of tissues, Harris sympathized, referring to D.C. as “a toxic swamp of pollen.” People from outside the area, she went on, “are not acclimated to this mix.” It was a botanical comment, but it reminded me of something one of Harris’s old friends had told me about the vice president’s seeming discomfort in the capital, and how much happier she appeared when traveling to other parts of the country.

Perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021. A recent op‑ed in The Hill, largely sympathetic to the vice president, urged the Biden campaign to get her “off the sidelines”—this during a week when she traveled to Indianapolis; Jacksonville, Florida; and Chicago. (Many weeks, she is on the road at least three days out of seven.) At one point during my conversation with David Axelrod, he wondered why Harris hadn’t become more of a champion for the administration’s most significant achievements, such as the infrastructure package. But much of her cross-country travel is focused exactly on that.

Of course, Harris is not alone in having trouble breaking through. “I mean, why do only a third of voters know what the president has done?” Celinda Lake, the pollster, asked when we spoke. “My God, they spent millions of dollars on it. They’ve got ads up now.” If voters don’t know what the president has done, Lake said, “they sure as heck aren’t going to know what the vice president has done.”

This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard.

Vice presidents are chosen mainly for political reasons—as Harris was—and not actuarial ones. In most of the presidential elections during the past half century, the possibility that the candidate at the top of the ticket might die in office was not a significant issue. (It was an issue for John McCain, in 2008, with his history of multiple melanomas, which was one more reason McCain’s selection of the erratic Sarah Palin as his running mate had such negative resonance.) This time around, given Biden’s age, the words heartbeat away connote a real possibility.

[Read: Why Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris]

When I asked Zients what he’s observed in Harris that makes him confident about her abilities as a potential chief executive, he at first started chuckling in what seemed to be discomfort at the subtext of the question. (“Well, I want to, you know, make sure we’re not talking about anything—but, you know, she’s prepared.”) But after that he went on thoughtfully: “You know, the first thing I go to is when you’re president, there are so many issues, and understanding what’s most important to the American people, what’s most important to America’s position in the world—it takes experience, which she has, and it takes a certain intuition as to what matters most, and she’s very good at quickly boiling it down to what matters most, and focusing on those issues, and then within those issues or opportunities, understanding what’s most important, and holding the team accountable.”

That’s a sharp assessment of what a vice president can bring to the table, and not a bad way to make important observations about Harris that seem matter-of-fact and not tied to the prospect of a sudden transition.

So I was surprised when another White House official, who knows both Harris and Biden well, treated the topic of readiness as if it were somehow illegitimate—a ploy by desperate Republican candidates. “People who are polling near the bottom do things and say things to try and be relevant and get oxygen.” Was it ridiculous to ask about Harris’s constitutional closeness to the presidency? “She is the closest to the presidency, as all of her predecessors have been.”

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, and Ron DeSantis, all of them presidential candidates, have explicitly raised the specter of a “President Harris.” So have other Republicans. The probable GOP nominee, Donald Trump, who habitually belittles women, will likely do so too. He has referred to Harris as “this monster” and has questioned her citizenship. On one occasion, he made fun of her name—“Kamala, Kamala, Kamala,” repeating it slowly with various pronunciations. Harris called him childish for that, but has largely declined to take the bait. Perhaps not surprisingly for a former prosecutor, she has become more publicly outspoken than anyone else in the White House about the indictments that Trump faces and the need to hold lawbreakers accountable.

The Biden administration has every incentive to embrace Harris. Why does addressing preparedness seem so difficult? Harris has affirmed that she is ready, if need be, but there’s a limit to what she herself can say. It’s not unusual for a president, any president, to take pains to demonstrate his vice president’s readiness for the top job, if only by regularly referencing their closeness—the notion that the person is briefed on everything and has an opportunity to weigh in on major decisions, even if the fingerprints aren’t always visible. And no president comes to the Oval Office with every necessary skill. Harris is an uncomfortable fit in the vice president’s role, whatever that is, and she cannot speak or act independently; the job makes every occupant a cipher. But she has been a successful public servant for more than three decades. She ran the second-largest justice system in America, in a state that is the world’s fifth-largest economy. By virtue of her position, she is among those who represent the future of her party, and she represents its mainstream, not its fringe. Of course Kamala Harris is ready for the presidency, to the extent that anyone can be ready. This should not be hard for her own colleagues to talk about. Not talking about it leaves the subject open for political exploitation—by opponents whose own likely candidate makes the idea of readiness absurd.

And yet the topic is treated as a trip wire. In a brief conversation after an abortion-rights rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the first anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I asked Harris herself: Had she and Biden discussed how to address questions about her readiness to step in as president, should circumstances ever require it? “No,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Her?”