U.S. Presidential elections 2024: What to read ahead of the Harris-Trump showdown
The Hindu
U.S. Presidential elections 2024: What to read ahead of the Harris-Trump showdown. Reading the fineprint to understand what the future holds for America and the world after a deeply polarised campaign
With just days to go for the U.S. presidential elections on November 5, after what is arguably the most polarised campaign in recent history, it is time to start looking at what the future may hold. In the run-up to the polls, there were surprising turns, including the Joseph Biden-Kamala Harris switch as the Democrat candidate, and the assassination attempts on former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
A number of books on the upcoming elections makes it clear there are not two, but three likely outcomes: a Trump win, a Harris win, and a contested outcome that goes to the courts, and possibly the streets. “This is the strangest election cycle I’ve ever seen... I’m telling people, you’re worried about November, I’m worried about tomorrow morning,” says Trump loyalist and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, according to an exchange in War, Bob Woodward’s latest book, out just weeks before election day.
To turn the covers of a Woodward book is to spend hours as a fly on the wall in the White House and other places where important conversations take place in the U.S. capital.
From his iconic start with reporting partner Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon Presidency, and their book All the President’s Men, Woodward has honed his skill as the ultimate insider-outsider in Washington with more than a dozen books focused on different presidencies. His trilogy on the Trump Presidency (2017-2021), Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, and Peril (written with Robert Costa), brought out in granular detail the chaos, the unpredictability and the insecurity of the world’s most powerful country, and how that period changed the world.
Woodward’s latest, in that sense, takes off from previous books, Bush at War and Obama’s Wars, to speak about how the Biden years have dealt with three global conflicts: the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon after the October 7, 2023 attacks. The book is remarkably up to date, and provides an insight on the past few years in the Oval office and just outside it. Woodward takes note of Biden’s dogged decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, something he had failed to convince former President Barack Obama of doing.
He looks at Biden’s unsuccessful attempt at deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin from going into Ukraine, even though the U.S. had remarkable intelligence far ahead of time that Russia would invade. Woodward also observes how the U.S. Presidency has tackled Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader that Biden has a long history of run-ins with, while supporting Israel to the hilt.
Woodward’s recording of the profanity used by heads of state is sometimes jarring, but conveys the seriousness of the times: At one place, Woodward recounts Biden saying that Obama never took Putin seriously enough and “f***ed it up” in 2014 with the Crimean invasion, about the same time that Trump says that Biden had “f***ed us up” by not handling Putin better.
