“Fight – Inside the Widest Battle for the White House” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes details the public and behind-the-scenes history of the 2024 Presidential election. Beginning with President Joe Biden’s lackluster debate performance against Donald Trump, moving to Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and for Vice-President Kamala Harris to run instead, and ending with the election night results of the Trump/Harris contest, “Fight” shows the timeline of events of the battle for our country’s highest office.
The authors claim to have some 150 sources for their material, with a large proportion of those being “off the record” or anonymous in nature. While this is understandable, given the nature of the subject, it does leave you with a number of people being identified as “high level staffer”, “well-placed source” or “inside strategist” to deal with. To be sure, they also cite party leaders and operatives such as Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Jim Clyburn in the course of their backstage revelations, but some of the “juiciest” quotes or accounts are attributed to those off the record sources.
The reader will have to decide if they trust Allen and Parnes’ journalistic integrity in accepting the accuracy of so many unverifiable sources.
While reading this book I found my biggest issue to be how the authors treated Donald Trump as some sort of normal person and politician, rather than the pathological liar, con man, thief, grifter, egomaniac, racist, arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent buffoon that he is. Their portrayal seemed to be that he was nothing more than any other politician seeking office, rather than the convicted felon seeking to avoid sentencing for his crimes and visit revenge upon all his so-called “enemies” that he truly was.
So that was aggravating.
But the timeline is accurate and if you trust their sources for what went on behind the scenes then this book is a good history of what they (probably rightly) call the “wildest battle for the White House” that we’ll ever see in our lifetime.
Recommended.
Pingback: Boulder Campground in Carlyle, Illinois April 23 – 30, 2025 -