The fall of Biden

Over St. Patrick's Day weekend in 2024, US President Joe Biden hosted the traditional gathering of Irish and Irish American politicians in the White House.

- FINTAN O'TOOLE

Over St. Patrick's Day weekend in 2024, US President Joe Biden hosted the traditional gathering of Irish and Irish American politicians in the White House. This was home ground for Biden, the most ostentatiously Irish figure ever to occupy the Oval Office. He should have been able to schmooze his way through it on autopilot. Yet he had to use a teleprompter for his remarks. Even in the friendliest and least stressful of public environments, he could not risk the possibility of losing track of what he was saying.

In his lively, engaging but sometimes frustrating chronicle of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Chris Whipple records the incredulity of one of those at the gathering, Barack Obama's former chief of staff Bill Daley: "If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? 'How are they letting this thing go on?' he thought. 'This is crazy.'"

Elsewhere in Whipple's narrative, Daley expresses his anger at those around Biden in rather more earthy terms: "Every freaking one of them had no balls."

Whipple's previous book, The Fight of His Life (2023), is a sympathetic account of Biden's first two years in office, written with the obvious cooperation of his inner circle. It is thus unsurprising that Uncharted is most vivid when recreating the drama of the president's stubborn refusal to realize that he was in no condition to stand against Donald Trump last November.