2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America

by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

Overview

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In 2024, award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive, inside story of the most tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign in our history.

"A well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Donald Trump announced he was running for president again . . . Plenty of thrilling fly-on-the-wall moments." -The New York Times

“The whole world was against me, and I won,” said Donald Trump in an exclusive interview, ten days before his second inauguration. Nearly four years after Trump's first turbulent presidency concluded in a violent attempt to overturn the election, he made a political comeback on a scale that stunned the nation. How did the first U.S. president to become a convicted felon regain control of the White House? And at what cost? 2024 is the explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first.

Drawing on extraordinary access to the Trump, Biden, and Harris teams, 2024 takes readers beyond the speeches, rallies, and debates to reveal the innermost workings of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns. Beginning in August 2022 with the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and Trump's subsequent decision to run once again for president, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf chart how Trump stifled the rise of Republican opponents, including Ron DeSantis, and how his campaign, led by Susie Wiles, landed on a winning strategy. They reveal in unrivaled detail how Joe Biden and his team brushed off concerns about his age, ignored polling numbers, and held off the next generation of eager Democratic hopefuls-even as Biden was dealing with his own special counsel investigation and the trial of his son Hunter. After his disastrous debate performance forced him to withdraw, Biden anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate and tasked her with running the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. With only 107 days to distinguish herself from the past four years, Harris lacked the time or space to outrun Biden's shadow-a challenge in and of itself, but one which Biden would make even more difficult. On November 5th, 2024, Trump was elected the nation's forty-seventh president, and would return to power vindicated, emboldened, unrestrained, and burning for revenge.

Gripping, revelatory, and deeply reported, 2024 is the shocking inside story of the election that tested American democracy and would go on to shape the future of the free world.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

2024 is a well-paced, thorough and often (darkly) humorous account of the two-year campaign season that began when Donald Trump announced he was running for president again . . . Plenty of thrilling fly-on-the-wall moments.” —The New York Times

“[This] deeply sourced narrative charts the delusions of the main players and the disastrous debate that reset the campaign . . . Yet 2024 is about more than the horse race. It also chronicles how the elites unintentionally made Trump’s restoration possible, despite a torrent of criminal charges against him, 34 resulting in convictions, and civil lawsuits that saw him fined hundreds of millions of dollars.” —The Guardian

"With deep reporting and strong analysis, this might emerge as the definitive title on a hugely consequential election." —Kirkus Reviews

“Three journalists from some of the biggest news outlets in the United States—The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post—join the fray of authors that have taken on last year’s presidential race. The result is an immersive and philosophical tour of an election whose outcome, they argue, was anything but inevitable.” —The New York Times

"[This] deeply sourced narrative charts the delusions of the main players and the disastrous debate that reset the campaign . . . Yet 2024 is about more than the horse race. It also chronicles how the elites unintentionally made Trump’s restoration possible, despite a torrent of criminal charges against him, 34 resulting in convictions, and civil lawsuits that saw him fined hundreds of millions of dollars." —The Guardian

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194482597
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

January 10, 2025

Donald Trump, wearing a white golf shirt and a red hat that said trump was right about everything, bounded between rooms of his Florida pleasure palace. The president‑elect was running late between meetings, after spending hours on the links. The afternoon was warm and sunny, ten days before his second inauguration, and the Mar‑a‑Lago Club teemed with visitors. A group of women in matching red dresses boarded a charter bus outside. A stretch Cadillac Escalade limousine idled by the front door. Foreigners wearing name tags filled the golden lobby. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert passed through carrying a shimmering short dress. Roger Stone luxuriated on a white sofa holding an unlit cigar. “You’re the One That I Want” from the Grease soundtrack blasted over the sound system. Trump’s body man, Walt Nauta, who’d been charged alongside him with hiding and lying about classified documents, rambled through the lobby meeting fans. Trump’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, who’d been accused of demanding payoffs in exchange for recommending people to Trump for administration posts, was still around making introductions.

Tech executives, political operatives, and club members wandered the halls, hoping for a handshake or an autograph—or maybe an ambassadorship, an inauguration ticket, or a favor for a friend. Trump had been musing to members that maybe he should raise the club’s initiation fee, which was already more than half a million dollars. He had fundraising dinners almost every night with business executives and finance titans lavishly praising him and trying to influence him on issues like vaccines and the corporate tax code.

“Zuckerberg is in there,” Trump whispered slyly, pointing to another room. The Facebook founder was mediating a lawsuit that Trump had brought to challenge his suspension from the social media platform after the January 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol. Elon Musk, who would appear shortly, was in a different room nearby. “We’ve had everybody here,” Trump said. “We’ve had Google, we’ve had Facebook, we’ve had Bill Gates, we had Tim Cook, Apple—we’ve had all of them.”

They weren’t coming empty‑handed. They came bearing seven‑figure checks for his inauguration. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Uber, Toyota, Ford, GM, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs. His advisers said they did not have enough time and perks to accommodate all the new admirers. “I used to have a list,” Trump said. “And I always ask them, ‘Would you have been here if I lost? Would you have been here if I lost?’ It’s funny. They know the answer is no, but they don’t want to really say it. And it would be no if I were them too.”

He settled in a dining room with a curved glass panorama overlooking the ocean, helped himself to fried shrimp dipped in tartar sauce, and pondered how different his life would be now if he’d lost the election. Friends and politicians would have abandoned him. He would have faced multiple criminal trials. He might have lived out his golden years behind bars. Friends told him, “You were either going to win or your life was really going to be very unpleasant.” Miserable, even. He couldn’t disagree.

He was feeling especially triumphant on this afternoon, having appeared earlier that morning by video link in a New York court for sentencing. He had been convicted of thirty‑four felony counts for paying hush money to a porn star before the 2016 election. The crimes carried a penalty of up to four years in prison. But the judge, whom Trump had berated for months as biased and unfair, imposed nothing.

“Discharge, unconditional discharge,” Trump marveled. “Nobody ever even heard of it. ‘We are unconditionally discharging this case.’ It’s over. No fine. No penalty. No this. Nothing. It’s actually just a total win.” An aide interrupted the president‑elect to remind him he had to meet three candidates for secretary of the Air Force, and he was having dinner with lawmakers from the hardline House Freedom Caucus. “You have three interviews, sir, and you have to be at your dinner in an hour,” said the aide, Sergio Gor, who published Trump’s coffee‑table books (Save America and Our Journey Together) and would soon become the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Trump believed the biggest mistake of his first term was picking disloyal officials, and Gor was determined to disqualify candidates who had ever criticized Trump or anyone associated with him.

“I look a little bit sloppy,” Trump lamented, between bites of fried shrimp. He preferred to wear a suit and tie for such meetings. For all the hubbub around the club, it was more heavily fortified than ever before. No traffic was allowed on the oceanfront highway. Vehicles were screened by bomb detectors in a parking lot across the road. A metal detector and TSA‑like bag scanner guarded the front door.

“Let me ask you,” he said, taking a moment to reflect on his brush with death at a summer rally in Pennsylvania. “If that didn’t happen, that day in Butler didn’t happen, would the result have been . . . I think I would’ve won, but it might’ve been a little bit closer. Do you think? I don’t know. I would have preferred that it didn’t happen, obviously. But I cannot tell you whether or not it would’ve been closer.”

“I think you would’ve won no matter what, sir,” Gor said.
Gor pressed again about the Air Force interviews. Trump’s son, Don Jr., walked through the room. Musk soon followed. Natalie Harp, a former One America News Network anchor who took Trump’s dictation for social media posts and often carried a portable printer to show him flattering articles, sat in a corner, smiling as Trump talked.

Ever since he’d left the White House four years earlier, this club had been Trump’s refuge. Here, no matter his criminal jeopardy and political isolation, the sun was always shining, the fans were always fawning, and the toasts were always MAGA. The bathrooms were decorated with magazine covers and old pictures of Trump playing golf with Arnold Palmer or marching in a parade in Manhattan. A replica of Air Force One sat out in the lobby. His office displayed a drawing of his face on Mount Rushmore.

But now the world outside the curved glass of the dining room windows was Trump’s too. The four prosecutions against him had crumbled and collapsed. He had redefined the Republican coalition and created an existential crisis for the Democratic Party. He’d promised to pardon January 6 rioters, round up and deport millions of immigrants, start trade wars with allies, use government power to punish his critics, purge law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists, relocate homeless people to tent cities, eliminate government agencies, give his biggest donor free rein to slash federal spending, even act as a dictator, if only for a day. And America said OK. Almost every county shifted right. He im‑ proved with almost every demographic. He even won the popular vote. The acceptance and legitimacy Trump had craved his whole life was at last his to enjoy. A day earlier, he’d attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral, walking into Washington not as a scourge but as a conqueror. He could ignore the speech on character by the outgoing president, and the cold shoulder from the vice president he’d defeated. Instead he sat next to Barack Obama and invited him to play golf, enticing him with descriptions of Trump’s courses around the world. He was no longer an anomaly. He was being treated like an American president. He wanted to be remembered as a great one.

“Honestly, what can you say that was bad?” Trump said in the dining room. “I won. Seriously. I won against all odds. I won against the DOJ, and the whole world was against me. And I won.”

There was a view popular among some political insiders that this election had been over before it started. The overwhelming majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track. They were fed up with inflation, immigration, and overseas conflicts, and they blamed the sitting president (and his vice president) for their feelings of economic and global insecurity.

But the true story of the 2024 campaign is not so impersonal, and the outcome was not so predetermined. According to hundreds of interviews with the people closest to the Trump, Biden, and Harris campaigns, the election hinged on accidents and individual decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way. If Republicans moved on from Trump like every other defeated ex‑president, or coalesced around a single alternative. If Democrats got clobbered, as expected, in the 2022 midterms, and Joe Biden never ran for reelection. If any of his advisers ever told him he shouldn’t. If he faced a real primary challenge. If Trump never got indicted, or if Republicans didn’t respond by rallying to him, or if the prosecutions were more successful. If Trump and Biden didn’t agree to an early debate, or if Biden didn’t perform so poorly. If he stayed in, or didn’t endorse Ka‑ mala Harris right away. If she inherited a better campaign, or had more time to run one of her own. If Trump gave in to the chaotic impulses that defined his previous campaigns and went through with blowing up his own operation in the final stretch.

The result, however contingent, would affect nothing less than the lives of billions of people around the world and the course of human his‑ tory. Biden saw Trump as an existential threat to the American way of life as a democratic, free society, and he expected a second Trump ad‑ ministration to be more extreme and ruthless than the first. He conceptualized his first run against Trump, in 2020, as a “battle for the soul of the nation,” only to become still more horrified by the violence of January 6. He thought Trump and his movement were growing only more dangerous. He worried about losing the country he knew, but believed Trump was an aberration. Ensuring that—or failing to—would define his legacy and place in history.

Biden and his advisers constantly assessed the political winds and concluded that running for reelection was the obvious choice. They believed he governed well, and they cared that historians agreed, ranking Biden among the most successful modern presidents. They thought voters agreed too, based on the 2022 midterms, when Democrats outperformed historical patterns and widespread expectations. They drew further validation from the absence of a serious primary challenge from any of the party’s many ambitious younger rising stars. They knew his age was a problem but considered it a perception, not a reality. They insisted his age never affected his ability to govern, only to campaign. They also bet that whatever discomfort voters had with Biden, their aversion to Trump would prevail.

Biden and his team dug into this bunker mentality because they had long felt counted out and underestimated. For decades they were treated like the B team, a stepping stone to a more prestigious job with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Washington never believed in them. Yet they won and proved everyone wrong, hardening their resolve to defy their skeptics again.

Harris was also running against her doubters. She wanted to prove she was more than the 2019 also‑ran who didn’t even make it to Iowa, or the “DEI hire” that Republicans reduced her to. Her vice presidency got off to a rough start, and the press and the public largely started ignoring her; but while they weren’t looking, she improved her team and skills. She wanted to demonstrate herself as an established national leader with political strengths. Then suddenly she was thrust into an extraordinary situation, and Democrats desperately hoped she could overcome all Biden’s baggage if she just didn’t make any more mistakes.

The election fell in a year of deep anxiety about national decline, new technology, government failure, and changing social values. Trump always drew his strength from decades of pent‑up frustration with the American democratic system’s failures to address the hardships and problems that people experienced in their daily lives. In 2024, his supporters saw institutions stacked against them, from the economy to culture, leading them to identify viscerally with his legal ordeal, even though they had never experienced anything like it before.

Trump recognized that the fate of his prosecutions hinged on his return to office, meaning the stakes of the election included his personal liberty. He was perhaps equally motivated by the impact on his businesses, brand, fortune, and family name. He was also running to avenge the defeat in 2020 that he could never admit or accept. And while voters showed less concern for his health than Biden’s, Trump was at an age when many of his friends and peers were getting sick and dying. He increasingly talked about his mortality and legacy. He did not want his obituary to begin with “criminal” and “loser.”

In that effort he had the crucial assistance of a top adviser, Susie Wiles, who had her own reputation to rehabilitate and exile to overcome. She also wanted to prove that the Minotaur could be contained— that Trumpworld could be managed, his campaign did not have to be shambolic and treacherous like the previous ones, and she did not have to finish like so many previous advisers, with a knife in her back.

It was easy to forget how vulnerable Trump had been at the start of this campaign, in late 2022. He had trouble getting big‑name Republicans to come to his launch party. The excitement in the GOP was around another candidate who was supposed to be the new and improved version. There was even a moment when Trump might not have run at all.

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