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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

Kamala Harris vowed to do everything in her power to defeat Donald Trump in a stirring speech to campaign staffers in which she pledged to offer Americans a “brighter future” compared with the “chaos, fear and hate” proposed by her Republican rival.  

The US vice-president was speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday, the first full day since President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed her for the Democratic presidential nomination, shaking up the 2024 race for the White House. 

Harris’s comments came after she secured the backing of dozens of lawmakers and the most senior Democrats in Washington, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, making her the overwhelming frontrunner to win the party’s presidential nomination. 

The vice-president’s momentum was buoyed by a surge in fundraising: during the first 24 hours of her campaign, she collected a record $81mn in contributions — more than Biden raised in the first two months of his own bid. 

“In the days and weeks ahead I, together with you, will do everything in my power to unite our Democratic party, to unite our nation, and to win this election,” Harris said. 

Harris quickly took the fight to Trump, saying that as a prosecutor in California before she was elected to the Senate and then the vice-presidency, she had come across “perpetrators of all kinds”, including “predators” who had abused women, as well as “fraudsters” and “cheaters”. “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said. 

But Harris added that the focus of her campaign for the Oval Office would be broader. “Donald Trump wants to take our country back to a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights. But we believe in a brighter future that makes room for all Americans,” she said, asking: “What kind of country do we want to live in? A country of freedom, compassion and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” 

Harris’s remarks were preceded by a live phone intervention by Biden, who is ill with Covid-19 at his holiday home on the Delaware coast. “The name has changed at the top of the ticket. But the mission hasn’t changed,” the president told the campaign staff. To Harris, he said: “I’m watching you, kid. I love ya.”

Many Democratic donors were thrilled by Biden’s decision to step aside, describing his age as a major liability that could have brought down many other Democrats in Congress as well as dooming the White House race. Most were encouraged by the prospect of Harris taking the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month. 

The Harris campaign said that more than 888,000 people had donated in the day since she was endorsed by Biden, of whom 60 per cent had not given money in this election cycle.

The astonishing one-day haul was more than Biden attracted in his first 66 days on the campaign trail last year, more than he pulled in from a Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and more than three presidents — Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — raised together at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

It also exceeded Harris’s fundraising during the entirety of her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign, and topped the mammoth haul Trump’s campaign reported the day after he became the first ex-president to become a convicted felon.

During her speech in Wilmington, Harris said she had asked Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, to take charge of her presidential bid. She added that Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, would also stay on. 

Harris will be hoping that her entry into the race will give a jolt to the party’s prospects of taking back the White House by energising women, and young, Black and Hispanic voters, as well as drawing support from independent and swing voters turned off by Trump. 

But it could still be difficult for Harris to make gains against the Republican nominee, who has built a solid edge in polling since Biden’s disastrous performance in their televised debate last month and after surviving an assassination attempt.

Trump campaign advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita on Monday released a memo saying Biden’s decision had changed nothing. 

“The liberal elite and deep state — sensing the American public’s disgust with their lawfare, and now in a desperate Hail Mary — have swapped out an incumbent President for the incumbent vice-president in a ploy to try and shake up the race,” they wrote. 

The added: “The problem for the left and media elite? Kamala Harris is as bad, if not worse, than Joe Biden.”

Authorities released body camera footage Monday of Sonya Massey’s final moments before she was fatally shot by law enforcement at her home in Springfield, Illinois.

Massey, 36, was killed July 6 after she called the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office because she was afraid there might be a prowler outside, according to an attorney for her family and Illinois State Police.

Former Sangamon County Deputy Sean Grayson is accused of shooting Massey in the face after he and another deputy were dispatched to her home shortly before 1 a.m.

Grayson has been indicted on charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct, said Sangamon County State’s Attorney John Milhiser.

Grayson pleaded not guilty last week, according to his lawyer, Dan Fultz, who declined to comment after the body camera footage was released.

In the footage, Grayson and a second deputy can be seen knocking on Massey’s door a few times until Massey opens it.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Massey is heard saying to Grayson. The second deputy was not identified by authorities.

“Why would I hurt you? You called us,” Grayson responds.

The deputies tell Massey they checked the area around her house and didn’t see anybody, and then ask if she needs help with anything else. Grayson also asks Massey if she’s doing OK mentally, to which she answers, “Yes.”

“I love ya’ll, thank ya’ll,” Massey says as she’s closing her door. The deputies ask her if a black SUV in her driveway with a smashed window is hers, to which she says no and that someone brought it there.

The deputies then go into Massey’s house, where they ask her for her name so they “can get out of your hair.”

Massey then moves to her stove, where she picks up a pot from a burner. The situation escalates when she moves the pot from the stove.

“Where you goin’?” she asks the deputies.

“Away from your hot, steaming water,” Grayson responds.

“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” she says.

Massey does not approach the deputies with the pot and stays in her kitchen.

“You better f—— not I swear to God I’ll f——- shoot you in your f——- face,” Grayson says before pulling out his gun.

“OK, I’m sorry!” Massey says as she ducks.

The second deputy also pulls out his gun.

“Drop the f——- pot!” Grayson screams.

Three gunshots are heard as Grayson continues to yell at Massey to drop the pot. Massey cannot be seen from behind the kitchen counter, but video from Grayson’s body camera shows that Massey had let go of the pot when she ducked.

The deputies called for emergency personnel.

The second deputy says he’s going to get his kit.

“Nah, headshot dude, she’s done,” Grayson says to him. “You can go get it but that’s a headshot.”

“Yeah I’m not taking f——- boiling hot water to the f——- head,” Grayson continues. “Hey look, it f——- came right to our feet too.”

He then goes to get his medical kit, saying, “I mean, there’s not much we can do.”

“We can at least try and hold the, stop the blood,” the second deputy says. He then goes into the kitchen, finds a towel and holds it to Massey. Massey is blurred out in the footage, but a large pool of blood can still be seen near her head, and she can be heard gasping.

When Grayson makes his way back into the home, he asks another deputy who has since entered, “Is there anything we can do for her?” The deputy responds, “No.”

“All right, I’m not even going to waste my med stuff then,” Grayson says.

The deputy asks Grayson, “Where’s the gun?”

“No, she had boiling water and came at me with boiling water,” Grayson says.

When Grayson leaves the house, a member of law enforcement standing outside asks him if he’s OK.

“Yeah I’m good. This f——- b—- is crazy,” he responds and walks to his vehicle shortly afterward.

The second deputy stays with Massey, holding the towel to her head until medical help arrives. Grayson is not seen trying to aid Massey.

Massey was taken to a hospital, where she was declared dead, according to state police.

A use-of-force review conducted by state police found that while Grayson did not attempt to de-escalate the encounter, he was justified in pointing his service weapon at Massey to get her to comply. But it found the shooting was not justified because Grayson advanced toward Massey and put himself in a position where he could have been injured. 

Sangamon County Sheriff Jack Campbell said in a statement last week that Grayson had been fired because it was clear he “did not act as trained or in accordance with our standards.”

Milhiser said a review of the state police investigation, including body camera footage, “does not support a finding that Deputy Sean Grayson was justified in his use of deadly force.”

Grayson’s next court date is scheduled for Aug. 26.

“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC on July 10, smiling past Joe Biden’s insistence a day earlier that he would not be dropping his re-election bid unless the “Lord Almighty” ordered it.

Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, never publicly called for Biden to end his candidacy and make way for a new generation after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in late June. 

But for someone with the San Francisco Democrat’s heft in the party it was the equivalent of telling America’s commander-in-chief: think again.

When one of Pelosi’s closest political allies, California representative Adam Schiff, last week called for the president to step aside, it was all but over. “Mama bear has sent her message,” a senior Democrat in Washington said.

Biden’s downfall, an unprecedented political geronticide, played out over 24 days, with the president and his inner circle fighting to cling on to power as a growing band of Democrats — elected officials, donors and activists — undertook the ugly work of toppling him. They did so with misgivings but ultimately convinced that his candidacy would doom the nation to a Trump restoration in November and all that might accompany it.

The ending was unceremonious. On Sunday, at 1.46pm, Biden posted a one-page statement on social media from his holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he has been recuperating from Covid.

Almost instantaneously, he was showered with accolades — including from those who had worked to oust him. “He will undoubtedly go down in the history books as a true American patriot,” said Virginia Senator Mark Warner. Barack Obama called him “one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend”.

Having buried Biden, it was now time for the Democrats to praise him.

On one level, his fall is an epic event that may reverberate from the battlefields of Ukraine to the fight against climate change and American women’s freedom to make their own reproductive decisions. 

Yet it is also eminently relatable: the everyday story of a family attempting to persuade a beloved but declining patriarch to step aside. Or, as one Democratic operative in Washington described it: “The hardest case of taking away the keys from dad. Ever.”

It began in a television studio on CNN’s Atlanta campus that the cable network converted into a red-white-and-blue debate stage for the Trump-Biden match-up. It was Biden who requested the early June 27 debate — hoping to jolt a campaign that was trailing Trump in polls by a small but persistent margin.

In the event, it backfired. A rasping, rambling Biden ended up crystallising the worries about his age and fitness, rather than dispelling them.

“I was wishing that someone would jump out and stop it the way they do in a boxing match when an ageing champ is getting brutally beaten,” said Frank Aquila, a corporate lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell and Democratic fundraiser, who was watching with his wife in their Manhattan apartment.

They began frantically texting with family and friends. “They were all in shock,” he said.

The internet would soon be ablaze with clips of Biden stumbling and losing his train of thought — claiming at one point to have “finally beaten Medicare”.

“We are in Fuck City,” Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of the Endeavor talent agency, declared at the Aspen Ideas Festival the next morning, capturing Democrats’ sense of dread.

On Wall Street, a top rainmaker had his secretary clear his schedule as soon as the debate ended — including a meeting with the chief executive of a S&P 500 company in the middle of a takeover bid. “I immediately called up a bunch of my closest pals and we started co-ordinating our efforts,” this person recalled.

Over the coming days they would play a pivotal role, leveraging contacts in Washington, and delivering a stark message: no more money would be going to Biden.

The Biden team entered damage control mode. Before sheltering with his family at Camp David that weekend, the president tried to reassure wealthy donors at fundraisers in the Hamptons, the ultra-wealthy Long Island playground, and at New Jersey governor Phil Murphy’s estate overlooking the Navesink River.

Guests traded looks of disbelief that Biden relied on a teleprompter to deliver remarks to donors. “You can’t run the country with a teleprompter,” one adviser to a big Biden donor said.

The shock at Biden’s debate performance was fast turning to anger. Donors complained that they had been misled by the president’s inner circle about the extent of his decline. They were referring to a tight-knit group who had served him for decades, including Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Ted Kaufman.

The first lady Jill Biden was also a target. The president’s wife of 47 years and closest confidante was widely admired for her down-to-earth persona. Now she was being recast as Lady MacBiden, too enamoured with the trappings of the White House to discourage her husband’s worst instincts.

In Hollywood, the fury was aimed at Biden’s chief fundraiser Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of the DreamWorks film studio who some felt was peddling political make-believe.

“[Katzenberg] would say, ‘He’s fine, I was just with him,’” a Hollywood veteran and longtime Democratic donor recalled. “He had this famous quote for everybody, which was ‘I’m happy to put you in a room with him and you’ll see for yourself.’ But nobody did it.”

For those who cared to see it, evidence of Biden’s frailty abounded. Trump had been harping on it for years. There was the ever-present teleprompter. There was the way his wife and others formed a protective wall on stage, limiting the public’s view of his ginger steps. There was the regular adventure of the president attempting to mount the stairs to Air Force One.

More recently, there were the freezing episodes — both at a Juneteenth celebration at the White House and at a Los Angeles fundraiser, when Obama guided his former vice-president offstage by the arm.

Daniel Faraci, a Republican strategist, said there would inevitably be a “convenient blame game”. “But who can say they were really hoodwinked?” he asked.

On Friday, July 5 — eight days after the debate and three days after the first Democrat lawmaker had called for him to leave the race — Biden bowed to pressure and made a rare media appearance, sitting down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a Wisconsin school.

The 22-minute interview was mostly notable for the many ways Stephanopoulos asked the president the same question: was he too old for the job?

Biden performed better than he had during the debate — but not so well as to erase the doubts. As one Democratic consultant remarked: “He could do 400 interviews with George Stephanopoulos and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

In private meetings, including a Sunday evening conference call convened by Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, representatives in competitive districts warned that Biden would drag them down. The party was now in danger of losing both House and Senate. Trump would be unbound in a second term.

But the next morning, instead of relenting, Biden fought. Borrowing a page from Trump, he blamed “elites” and the news media for turning against him. In a defiant letter to Congress he ordered legislators to “turn the page”.

“He’s a brutally stubborn man,” a Biden fundraiser said of a blue-collar politician who prided himself on never giving up — overcoming his childhood stutter, the death of his first wife and young daughter and his humiliating exit from the 1987 Democratic primary.

Democrats were now adrift. Some acknowledged Biden’s weaknesses but believed it was suicidal to make a change just four months before an election.

If the party did switch horses, the cleanest solution would be to pass the nomination to vice-president Kamala Harris, who would inherit the campaign’s $230mn war chest. But many donors believed she would fare no better against Trump.

Yet passing over Harris, who is of Black and south Asian descent, risked inflaming a core Democratic constituency — especially if the job went to a white candidate instead. The party was already riven between centrists and progressives, urban elites and the working class, and its rivalrous Clinton, Biden and Obama factions.

“Everybody is terrified by a Trump presidency and everybody wants to do anything and everything possible to prevent that,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star who represents the Bronx borough of New York City. But nobody could seem to agree on the way forward.

She too railed against the elites trying to topple Biden. “Many of these people are the same people who closed ranks around anybody who wanted to raise this conversation a year ago,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

By Tuesday, July 9, Biden appeared to be gaining the upper hand. Democrats who had voiced concerns about the president in private were now giving him their public backing.

“I’m with Joe,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, would say to reporters time and again, his smile a shield. With the party’s mid-August convention approaching, time was on Biden’s side — even if age was not.

Then Pelosi emerged. Steely and skilful at 84, she well understood the agony of ageing out of an office. Two years earlier, when the Democrats lost control of the House, she relinquished her leadership role to make way for the younger Jeffries. The grace with which she did so only seemed to elevate her stature in the party.

“Nancy is the most important voice, and she’s furious,” a prominent Democratic donor explained.  

Pelosi’s studious non-endorsement of the president that Wednesday morning coincided with the publication of a stinging op-ed penned by George Clooney, the Hollywood star who had co-hosted a bonanza fundraiser a month earlier that bagged $30mn for Biden.

“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote.

Inside the Biden campaign, the mood turned to despair. Some staffers confided to friends that they believed the cause was lost. Others worried that they might face legal repercussions for misleading the public about the president’s condition.

It was a bright summer’s day when the president’s motorcade rolled into Detroit on Friday, July 12. The previous evening he had muddled through another make-or-break encounter with the media, holding a press conference at the conclusion of the Nato summit in Washington. Biden managed to both flub names — referring to his “vice-president Trump” — and also display deep knowledge of global affairs.

Detroit felt like a spiritual homecoming if not a literal one. The capital of the US car industry had been left for dead but managed to claw its way back. Biden had played no small part in its salvation, overseeing the emergency loans that kept General Motors afloat after the 2008 financial crisis. Now Biden needed its grit.

The venue at Renaissance High School gymnasium felt intimate compared with the tens-of-thousands of attendees that packed some Trump rallies. Many of the Biden supporters wore T-shirts advertising their union membership. Many were Black, a constituency that led Biden to a commanding victory in a crowded Democratic primary four years earlier. Conspicuously absent was Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor who had been touted as possible replacement for Biden.

“He’s not perfect but he’s not cruel,” said Nola Pankoff, 67, who had come to her first Biden rally that day with her husband, Steve, so they could lay eyes on the president themselves, without the filter of the media.

The Biden on offer that day was uneven. He confused names. He sometimes appeared to struggle reading the teleprompter. Stiff though he appeared, there was still a sparkle when he smiled at a well-wisher.

At one point, early on, a lone voice cried out: “We love you!” It seemed to lift Biden, and the rote routine of a 35-minute stump speech was transformed into something more.

“He needed that,” one woman said, visibly relieved, as she left.

That rally now feels like a swan song for an ageing politician. The next day, in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old man would fire a volley of bullets from a nearby rooftop at Trump, injuring his ear and killing a retired fireman sitting in the front row. In an image that instantly became iconic, a bloodied Trump rose to his feet, waved his fist in the air, and exhorted his supporters to “fight!”.

The contrast was unmistakable: one candidate struggling to walk while the other dodged an assassin’s bullet. To make matters worse, Biden would soon be diagnosed with Covid.

As Biden took to his sick bed in Delaware, the campaign against him in Washington shifted into high gear. Party elders stood silent as each day brought fresh defectors publicly calling for the president to step aside.

The ugliness of the denouement brought to mind an old observation by Andrew Card, George W Bush’s chief of staff: “If anybody tells you they’re leaving the White House voluntarily, they’re probably lying.”

By Saturday evening, Biden was coming around to the inevitable, according to people familiar with the matter. The next day, he called Harris, his chief of staff, Jeff Zients, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, his campaign chair, to relay his decision.

In the aftermath, Democrats like Frank Aquila, the corporate lawyer, seemed as much stricken as relieved. “We all loved Biden because he was a pragmatist capable of keeping the different souls of the party . . . united,” he said. “That’s why it was so hard to accept that he wasn’t fit any longer to be our candidate.”