Joe Biden Was “a Shell of Himself” by End of Term. Hunter Biden Didn’t Help.

They had served their time. Jonathan Allen, a political reporter at NBC News, and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent at The Hill, had written bestsellers about the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. They were done. Then came the night in June when President Joe Biden sank his own campaign with a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

“In the weeks leading up to the debate, we had sources—both of us—ask us if we were going to do a book,” Parnes says. “And we both said, ‘No, no, we’ve been there, done that.’”

Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House arrived this week, loaded with, well, insider details about how Biden, Trump, and Kamala Harris tried to win the presidency: Biden aides laying down strips of fluorescent tape to help guide the president’s walk through a New Jersey fundraiser; Trump surprisingly turning away from chaos and turning down Corey Lewandowski’s bid to oust rival campaign aides; and Harris being hamstrung by Biden’s insistence that there be “no daylight” between the two Democrats.

I spoke with Allen and Parnes at a moment when the consequences of the 2024 election were hitting hard, everywhere from Wall Street to Kyiv. In the interview, edited for length and clarity, the two described how they discovered more Democratic dysfunction than was apparent at the time, and how Trump’s team kept its candidate under control. Mostly.

Vanity Fair: The opening scene of the book describes a series of power players as they watch the fateful Biden-Trump debate. Where were the two of you that night?

Jonathan Allen: I was at Shelly’s Back Room on F Street Northwest in Washington, smoking a cigar, watching the debate, and calling and texting with sources.

Amie Parnes: I was at home. My phone was blowing up. I think I had maybe 50 text exchanges that night with freaked-out lawmakers, strategists, basically everyone—Republicans, Democrats. I often go back and look at those messages because they were surreal.

At that point, in June 2024, President Biden’s physical and mental capacities had long been a central issue in the campaign. Was his terrible debate performance still a surprise to you?

Parnes: It was just stunning to watch.

Allen: We’d been watching Biden’s decline for a long period of time and, honestly, thought he had lost his fastball some when he was running in 2020. And it was still so shocking to see the leader of the free world so bereft of coherent thought.

Your book describes the lengths to which the president’s longtime inner circle—including first lady Jill Biden and senior advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti—went to hide that decline. Who was most responsible?

Parnes: All of them. It’s pretty remarkable how they kept him very closed off. He was a shell of himself. When he entered the White House, he was so, so different from the man who I covered as vice president, a guy who would hold court in the Naval Observatory with reporters until the wee hours.

How large a part of the equation was Hunter Biden?

Allen: Most people have looked at Hunter Biden as somebody that his father has had to deal with. And what we really found in the reporting here is that Hunter Biden is somebody that his father wanted to deal with on political issues, that Hunter was, as was described to us by one source, his father’s closest political adviser, which is mind-blowing. I mean, if you’re seeking—and I don’t mean this to knock Hunter Biden in an untoward way, but it is not clear that he has the best record as somebody you would lean on for judgment.

The book doesn’t use the word cover-up to describe the effort to conceal the extent of Joe Biden’s deficits. Was it one?

Allen: I think our view is that there is more complexity to it. Largely, the people who are closest to the person in power are people who do not tell that person things they don’t wanna hear…If you were going to stand up and say something, you would be thrown out of the room. That basically happened with Anita Dunn toward the end.

What we saw was a lot of bad decision-making and, perhaps at the very top, people putting their own interests, and what they believed were Joe Biden’s interests, above the interests of the Democratic Party and the country. And so that’s a failure. That’s a moral failure, but maybe not a criminal one, which is what the term cover-up sort of implies, a criminal conspiracy, and we didn’t reach that threshold.

Dozens of reporters pursued the truth about Biden’s age and health; I wrote about it way back in May 2023. Yet did we, the mainstream media, still blow it?

Parnes: No, I don’t think we missed it. I think we were all onto it. But the problem is, I think [the Biden camp’s] response was kind of unethical in a way. When I called the White House and I tried to do a story on the president’s exercise routine—which is something that every president has sort of put out, minus Trump, maybe—that was pretty low-hanging fruit, and that should have been a sign to me at the time—and I think it was—the fact that they couldn’t even tell me what he did, if anything. Those were all signs that something wasn’t right there.

A common frustration for readers of presidential campaign books is, “Now you tell us! Why didn’t you report this a year ago instead of saving it to sell books?”

Allen: I think we started our interviews in August, but the vast majority we did were postelection, for a variety of reasons. No, we didn’t hold anything back for the book that would have been material to the election at all. Amie and I both did significant reporting during the year, or during the election, on all of these aspects.

One of the book’s revelations is the effort by Biden’s team, when the president was trying to hold on to the nomination, to criticize Kamala Harris’s prospects as a replacement. How much did the vice president’s camp know about that undermining at the time?

Allen: We don’t have deep reporting on this, but I suspect they were somewhat aware, because they’re all talking to the same people; they have the same donor bases. What is shocking is the brazenness with which Joe Biden’s top aides were attacking the sitting vice president of the United States and the person clearly most likely to take over if Joe Biden stepped aside, basically attempting to drown her in order to keep his head above water at a time when it should have been clear to them that he was not capable of beating Donald Trump. And when I talk about the brazenness, I mean they sent electronic messages to people trashing the vice president, saying if you keep pushing on Joe Biden to get out, you’re going to end up with Kamala Harris, and that’s going to be a huge mistake.

You explore one of the highest-profile mysteries of the subsequent Harris campaign: why it never responded to the Trump campaign’s trans-bashing TV ad.

Parnes: Bill Clinton was watching football games and watching that ad, and his blood was boiling so much that he calls the top brass of the campaign—not only [campaign chair] Jen O’Malley Dillon, but others—to complain and say, Why aren’t you doing anything about it?

Allen: They basically told him, Your political instincts suck, and our data say that this is an ineffective ad…It’s sort of the victory of ridiculous data over common sense. I think that that’s been a common theme in recent campaigns for Democrats.

On the Republican side, one piece of conventional wisdom during 2024 was that Trump was running a more professional campaign than his first two. Was that actually true, or was his campaign leadership just better at containing his craziness?

Allen: Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita played important gatekeeper roles in terms of limiting the influence of some of the more provocative people around him. I think they also did a pretty good job of locking down the leaks that we’ve come to expect from Trumpworld…Look, I mean, you can’t control Trump. He’s going to do what he’s going do, but I think the attitude of Susie Wiles and the people around her was, If he’s gonna lose because he does something, that’s one thing, but him losing because the campaign is not pointed in the direction of supporting him is another thing, and the latter would be unacceptable, and anybody who risked the latter would have been gone.

One of the benefits of this being your third presidential campaign book is that you’ve observed Trump over the course of 10 years. What was the biggest difference in him this time around?

Allen: He learned. He’s a guy who’s also pretty up there in age, and not everybody continues to want to learn as they get older. But what he learned was that part of the reason he lost in 2020 was that he hurt himself in some ways by leaning so heavily toward his base…The Project 2025 thing, that’s something you would normally have expected him to lean into because he was such a base politician. And yet he basically said, I have nothing to do with Project 2025. Now, I think his supporters and his critics both knew very well that if he got elected, he was going to follow Project 2025 almost word for word. But in terms of how he presented himself to the broader public, he moved away from that.

How has the political media environment changed most since 2015?

Allen: I think there are fewer and fewer people that want to hear objective truth. And there are more people who are comforted and happy enough to hear from one side or the other and not both sides.

Parnes: There’s so many people covering the campaign; there are all these independent journalists now, and so these stories have been picked over and told a million times. We talked to more than 150 people, and we were able to dig beneath the surface in order to find out what was really happening, and that’s really increasingly hard to do.

Do you think you will be covering a fourth Trump presidential campaign in 2028?

Allen: [Laughs] He certainly is enjoying not ruling it out. And he seldom says things that he doesn’t mean.