Chapter 29 #2
Many wanted an open convention. Small whispers turned into a loud roar.
To get ahead of this, we had invited Kamala and Doug to join us at the White House Fourth of July celebration that year.
It was felt that the visual of all four of us together would signal that this was the ticket, period.
If not Joe, then Kamala. We were sticking together.
When people couldn’t convince Joe to quit, they began lobbying me. I was encouraged to “be the hero,” to come out and say, “I’ve convinced my husband not to run.”
Some people who thought I could be persuaded to tell Joe to drop out insisted that I’d done it before.
They pointed to a moment in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election.
But back then, Joe had told me that he didn’t want to run that year.
Political pundits kept showing up at our house trying to convince him to take on George W.
Bush. Day after day, these men in their suits continued to arrive at our home to badger him.
One day, I’d had enough. Sitting by the pool in my bikini, I found myself getting madder and madder.
Finally, I wrote “NO” in black Sharpie on my stomach, then walked through their strategy session.
I was not saying no to Joe. I was expressing my exasperation with those aggressive men who were tromping through my home trying to make Joe do something he’d explicitly told them he didn’t want to do.
In 2016, Joe was contemplating running again.
But Beau had just died. I believed that during the campaign, when anything related to Beau came up—the military, cancer, family—Joe would have a raw emotional response.
I thought that could be a liability for him.
“The people do not want a weeping president,” I said.
Maybe that wasn’t true. People loved it when Bill Clinton felt people’s pain and cried.
But I’m from an era where it was believed that leaders had to be stoic.
Still, if Joe had decided he wanted to run that year, I’d have supported his choice, even if it meant sailing the country on a river of tears.
In 2024, Joe wanted to stay in the race, and so I was going to do my best to support him.
Not only did I believe in his ability to do the job, but I also felt inspired by his plans for another term.
I believed that he would continue to bring down inflation, protect the environment, fix the tax code, and safeguard women’s health.
Out on the trail, I felt momentum gathering again behind him.
On July 13, 2024, Joe’s opponent was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania by a twenty-year-old man.
It was horrifying, and beyond me how it had happened given the usual protocols of locking down an area.
The dramatic image of the once and future president with blood on his face, making a fist, was everywhere.
I called Melania and said that I was thinking of her and Barron.
She was polite and controlled as ever. She said they were “good,” and thanked me for calling.
Out in Las Vegas on July 17, Joe was scheduled to address a large Latino gathering, the UnidosUS Annual Conference. When we spoke that morning, he seemed happy with his speech, but his voice sounded strained. Was he sick again?
A few hours later, I got a call from Annie saying he was coughing a lot.
“Did you COVID test him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Hold on.”
The irony was that throughout the pandemic, every time you sniffled, everyone you’d seen all week got tested.
But here, the man clearly had COVID symptoms, and they didn’t even think to test him for days?
He was positive. Then they had to figure out how to get him home without getting everyone else on the plane sick.
They found a way to sequester him on Air Force One, and they flew him back to Delaware Thursday night.
At midnight, he arrived at our Rehoboth beach house.
“How’s my girl?” Joe asked as he walked into the house, smiling at the staff member sitting up late in the living room.
The aide told him that I was already in bed upstairs.
That night, Joe slept in a separate bedroom downstairs so he wouldn’t get me sick.
At least I was trying to sleep; there was a heaviness to those days that led to horrible nightmares about being chased and held down.
I wondered how a psychologist would analyze them.
One person after another called to tell Joe what they were seeing: Your age is a factor. You’re underwater. Trump is leading in these polls.
Joe was obsessed with his iPhone and the Apple News feed, and his algorithm was selecting the worst of the worst. He was constantly watching Fox.
He saw and heard all the negative discourse.
During campaigns, pollsters become like demigods.
This round, it seemed that they all wanted to be in front of the principal with the most dramatic reports.
One thing I heard later was that Joe’s inner circle shielded him from bad news and kept him in a bubble of delusional optimism. That’s incorrect. He was being deluged with news every day; nearly all of it was bad.