US Politics
Kamala Harris claims Biden called her minutes before Trump debate to ask if she was bad-mouthing him
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Moments before stepping onto the stage for her live televised debate with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris was blindsided by an unexpected phone call from then-President Joe Biden asking her if she’d been badmouthing him to Democrat donors.
Harris, caught in the final minutes of mental prep before facing Trump in front of millions, claims the moment threw her off balance at a critical juncture in her presidential bid.
“My head had to be right. I had to be completely in the game,” she writes in a memoir set to be published next week.
“I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself.”
The account appears in Harris’s upcoming memoir, 107 Days, set to hit shelves Thursday, and which details the frenzy of her ultimately doomed run for the White House.
In the call, Biden claimed several “power brokers” in Philadelphia were upset by apparent criticism of him after he pulled out of his re-election campaign, and were threatening to pull support from Harris.
The former California senator said the timing of the call meant Biden was “distracting me with worry about hostile power brokers in the biggest city of the most important swing state.”
The behind-the-curtain glimpse into the raw nerves and political theater of Harris’s rushed presidential campaign reveals the scale of the task she faced in the aftermath of Biden’s abandonment from the race.
Passages reveal Harris’s “warmth and loyalty” to Biden, for whom she served as vice president during his term in office, but also the extent to which he frustrated her own tilt at the presidency.
With just 107 days – as the book’s title indicates – to put together her campaign, choose a running mate, set out a policy programme and ingratiate herself to the American public, Harris found herself defending Biden’s record, but unable to count on his support.
In another incident recounted in the memoir, just a day after Harris debated with Trump, Biden was photographed wearing a “Trump 2024” campaign hat, with the image rapidly spreading on the internet along with the message that “Biden endorses Trump over Harris”.
At the time, the Trump campaign put out a social media post reading: “Thanks for the support, Joe!”
Eventually, Harris made greater efforts to distance herself from Biden publicly. Still, he realized she “took too much time” to do this before becoming aware of the damage her perceived closeness to him was doing to her efforts to secure the presidency.
The book also claims that while Trump went to lengths to disparage Harris in public, in private, he routinely praised her.
“You’ve done a great job, you really have,” Trump reportedly told her. “My only problem is it makes it very hard for me to be angry at you.”
In another section, she writes that Trump told her his daughter Ivanka was a “big fan,” and also asked her to say hello to her husband, Doug Emhoff, for him.
107 Days by Kamala Harris is published by Simon & Schuster and released on 23 September 2025.
