https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n01/david-runciman/calling-dr-jekyll
David Runciman
107 Days
by Kamala Harris.
Simon and Schuster, 304 pp., £25, September 2025, 978 1 3985 5791 8

One regular theme​ of the reports that came out of Trump’s first administration was that no matter how bad it looked on the surface, it was even worse behind the scenes. The long-standing Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, who positioned himself as tittle-tattle-in-chief during those years, wrote a series of books – Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide – describing the endless tantrums, dressings down and sulks that took place inside the Oval Office. No one was safe from the president’s terrible personality: generals were belittled, senators squashed, lawyers hired and fired on a whim and passers-by caught in the crossfire. The rapid turnover of West Wing staff was testament to what a truly horrible workplace it must have been.

Trump 2.0 is different. Now the stories that emerge from people who have seen behind the curtain tell of a calmer atmosphere and a nicer man – nicer, at least, than you might expect. Some of the witnesses are not entirely to be trusted, of course. Conrad Black, the convicted fraudster whom Trump pardoned in 2019, was in the White House on the day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and wrote giddily about the experience in the National Post. Here he was, waiting for his audience with the president before the news broke:

The ambience is one of constant and purposeful activity in a shared and good-spirited cause. Occasionally, it happened that successive doors were simultaneously ajar, and the familiar voice of the chief occupant would be heard, good-humoured but authoritative ... Here it was possible to see how the private office functioned and it was clear the president’s staff is devoted to him personally and that he, unlike some holders of great offices that I have known, is unfailingly polite to staff ... He was looking trim, fit and completely undaunted by the requirements of his position.

Black also enjoyed the scenery. ‘A pleasing aesthetic aspect, as usual in Trump matters, is the presence of very capable and attractive youngish ladies on the presidential staff.’

But it isn’t only cronies who have been impressed. Earlier this year the comedian and talkshow host Bill Maher went to see Trump expecting the worst and didn’t find it. ‘I’ve had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected, people who don’t look you in the eye, people who don’t really listen because they just want to get to their next thing ... None of that with him. And he mostly steered the conversations to “What do you think about this?” I know. Your mind is blown. So is mine.’ Maher ended his reflections with a puzzle. ‘Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings I don’t know.’ Then again, he may have been played. In the New York Times, Larry David responded to Maher’s account of his cheery time visiting the commander-in-chief with an alternative version: ‘My Dinner with Adolf.’ ‘It wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself.’

Now Kamala Harris has joined the list of those who have been surprised by Trump’s softer side. In 107 Days, her excruciating memoir of her failed campaign to defeat him for the presidency in 2024, she recounts their conversation on 17 September, when she called her rival after a would-be assassin had been discovered on one of his golf courses in Florida. Following an exchange of formalities, she recalls, Trump became ‘surprisingly effusive’. He told her: ‘You’ve done a great job, you really have. You’ve done a very, very good job ... my only problem is it makes it very hard for me to be angry with you.’ Then he started gushing about Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff. ‘And say hello to your husband. He looks like a really good guy. He did a really good job at the convention, by the way. I watched his speech. He really was good.’ Trump let Harris know that his daughter Ivanka was a big fan too.

Harris concluded from all this something she says she already knew: Trump is a con man. He is more than capable of being different things to different people to suit himself. During his first term a common refrain was that what you see is what you get, for better and for worse – Trump’s authenticity stemmed from the fact that he was the same bullying braggart on stage and off. He didn’t hide his true self from the voters. Harris discovered that this was not the case. ‘I’d readied myself for a phone conversation with Mr Hyde,’ she writes. ‘But Dr Jekyll had picked up the call.’ In other words, the man is a hypocrite. But Harris doesn’t say what an unusual sort of hypocrisy this is. Most politicians put their best face forward and are exposed when it is discovered they have a seamier side. Trump is apparently hiding the fact that he is not the monster he likes to present in public. I noticed something of this curious double standard when watching the videos of some of Trump’s podcast appearances during the campaign. Often the filming started before the official recording got underway and Trump could be seen chatting with his hosts more or less like a regular human being – he was engaging and even somewhat self-aware. Then the official conversation started and a light went off behind his eyes as the trash talk began.

Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was she meant to tell people that he’s not as bad as he looks or that he couldn’t be trusted because he might be capable of empathy? She is on much safer ground with the smooth-talking J.D. Vance, whom she seems genuinely to loathe and strongly suspects of concealing a volcanic inner nastiness. Her misgivings come to a head during Vance’s debate with her running mate, Tim Walz. Harris had chosen Walz over better qualified candidates such as Pete Buttigieg or Josh Shapiro because she saw the advantage of his down-home qualities and relatable life story. Walz had warned her, however, that he wasn’t up to much as a debater. This turned out to be true, though what appalled Harris on the night was the readiness with which Walz fell for Vance’s fake bonhomie. ‘J.D. Vance is a shape-shifter,’ she writes. ‘He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy.’ Walz’s job was to goad his opponent into revealing his true self. Instead, he played along. Harris, watching the TV coverage from home, was horrified. ‘When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug: “What is happening?”’

Her response is emblematic of what was wrong with her campaign. She chose Walz because he was a good guy – ‘most people can relate to a high-school coach,’ was her wafer-thin rationale – but then she wanted him to be someone he wasn’t: an attack dog. She also wanted the campaign to conform to the only pattern she was comfortable with, in which she occupied the high ground and her opponents could be cast as crooks and charlatans. They refused to play along. When she needed them to be nasty they were nice. When she revealed her weaknesses, they tore her apart in a manner she considered deeply unfair. Why couldn’t the media and the electorate see that their attacks revealed who they were, not who she was? The answer is that who she was didn’t stack up in the way she believed it did. And that was what was so easy to attack.

The most notorious Trump campaign ad exploited Harris’s support for state-sponsored gender-affirming medical treatment for prisoners with the brutal slogan: ‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.’ Harris explains that when she was attorney general of California she had been required to represent the state against an inmate who was seeking gender-affirming surgery. This gave rise to the accusation that she was opposed to trans rights. She wanted people to know she was just doing her job, which is why when asked about the issue in 2019 by the ACLU she made clear that her personal views were not those she had defended as a lawyer. Harris deeply regrets that she didn’t come up with a more effective response to the ad. ‘I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between “they/them” and “you”. The pronoun that matters is “we”. We the people. And that’s who I am for.’ Another line that Harris likes to use – it’s in her author bio at the back of this book – is that ‘throughout her career she has always fought for the only client she has ever had: the people.’ But it was when fighting for the people of California as their attorney general that she sought to block gender-affirming surgery for prisoners. And it was that position she wanted to make clear didn’t reflect who she really was. So who is she? I’m not sure even she can say.

Harris complains that the 107 days between the announcement of Biden’s decision not to run for re-election and election day simply weren’t long enough for her to get her message across. She blames many people for this impossibly narrow window, including Biden and his wife, Jill, along with the Democratic Party insiders who insisted he was fit to run again. At the same time, she believes that she was fighting an uphill battle against a political system that refused to give a candidate like her a fair hearing and that the prejudice got worse as the contest wore on. In that respect the campaign was too long as well as too short.

At first she seemed to be doing well. There was a freshness and energy to her candidacy after Biden’s desperate bumbling and she had a good nominating convention, something that Trump was happy to acknowledge. But then she got stuck. Her poll numbers refused to budge and nothing she tried seemed to help. This, she concludes, is because of the double standards to which she was subjected. Whenever she tried to explain what she stood for she was invariably accused of making things worse. ‘If I hesitated or backtracked mid-sentence to try to clarify or better express a thought, it was “word salad”. Meanwhile, Trump could describe Hurricane Florence as “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water”.’ There is an old saying in politics that when you’re explaining, you’re losing. When you are backtracking mid-sentence to clarify what you have just said, you have probably already lost.

Harris claims she was bubbling with ideas to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet most of the specific proposals she mentions relate to government positions and the people who might occupy them.

As president, there was so much more I could do. I wanted to see Gen Z given the tools they needed to become a new Greatest Generation, and I had so many ideas on how to help them. I wanted to create a secretary of culture to uplift the immense creative talent of this country. I wanted to change the way we think about our workforce, to assign value based on an individual’s skill, to open up government jobs to talented people who didn’t necessarily have a college degree.

She concedes that the biggest mistake she made during the campaign came when an interviewer asked her what she would have done differently from Biden over the previous four years and she replied: ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’ Afterwards she was kicking herself because she had prepared an answer to the question: ‘Throughout my career I have worked with Democrats, independents and Republicans, and I know that great ideas come from all places. If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.’ Earlier in the campaign her adviser David Plouffe had been blunt with her about one of the problems she faced: ‘People hate Joe Biden,’ he told her. It seems unlikely they hated him because he hadn’t put a Republican in his cabinet.

Harris believes that the difference between her vision for America and Trump’s was stark. ‘The campaign, I stressed, was about two very different versions of our country going forward, one focused on the future, one mired in the past.’ Yet it is she who seems to be stuck in the past, endlessly preoccupied with her own personal history and unable to break free from the kind of politics that had enabled her to rise to the top. She likes to attribute her dogged approach to loyalty. One reason she struggled to separate herself from Biden, she says, is that ‘I’ve never believed you need to elevate yourself by pushing someone else down. To do so would have been to embrace the cruelty of my opponent.’ It comes across as solipsism.

As this book makes clear, Harris is a creature of a system that too many Americans have come to mistrust. She relies on a large staff to support her in all her endeavours and offers repeated thanks to the many people who were the wind beneath her wings on the campaign. She is also quick to blame them when things go wrong. On the day she hears that Biden is going to drop out she is at home making pancakes with her grandnieces. The timing is inopportune. ‘The whole world is about to change. I’m here in sweatpants, and the two people staffing me right now are under four feet tall.’ I think this is intended as a joke but something about the transitive use of that word ‘staffing’ reeks of both privilege and dependency. Yes, running for president must be a terrifying business and any candidate needs all the help they can get. No, Trump wouldn’t have minded being left to his own devices when the shit hit the fan. It’s another way in which Harris singularly fails to come across as her own person.

When she pays tribute to all the wonderful individuals who have worked with and for her over the years Harris is keen to talk up their credentials (so-and-so went to this college, worked on that campaign, knew all the right people in the party – the Clintons, the Obamas – at the right time: the best and the brightest!). Much of this credentialism seems weirdly misplaced, not least because she ended up losing. It is also misapplied to her own career. That author bio at the end includes the strange boast that she ‘cast more tiebreaking votes than any vice president in history, including for pandemic relief and the largest climate investment ever’. She did this only because in a divided chamber there were plenty of ties to be broken and she happened to be in the chair. It had nothing to do with her – it was simply a formality attaching to the office that she held. Even her humblebrag that the people are the only client she has ever had is really just a grandiose way of describing her job title. She was a public prosecutor, which means that she worked for the people v. whoever was on the other side of the docket. Then she went into politics. Any career public prosecutor who got elected to anything could say the same.

Harris appears particularly tone-deaf when it comes to celebrity. She wanted her campaign to speak to and for the broadest possible swathe of American voters. She thought she was getting close to her goal one night in September. ‘If there was one event that captured the diversity of the coalition that had come together to support me, it was the Unite for America town hall hosted by Oprah Winfrey in Farmington Hills, Michigan.’ There were only four hundred people in the hall but more than two hundred thousand had joined on the Zoom screens that rose in tiers on either side of the stage. However, she only seems really interested in a few of them:

There were some famous faces on those screens, supporters such as Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Jennifer Lopez and Chris Rock, who joked he’d been a longtime fan of mine: ‘I remember writing her a cheque when she was like the district attorney for something, but maybe it was to get out of a parking ticket.’ Now, he said, he wanted to bring his daughters ‘to the White House to meet this Black woman president’.

But the power of the event wasn’t so much the celebrities as the hundreds of thousands of other faces, not well-known, from every possible demographic that could vote.

A sea of anonymity out of which she picks four names and records one set of remarks, which are about her own celebrity. ‘I look around at these screens, I look at who’s in the room, and this is America,’ she said to those gathered. It turned out this wasn’t the America that enough of America wanted to be.

Three days before the election Harris and Trump held competing rallies in the swing state of North Carolina. Trump’s was in Greensboro, where he repeated his fraudulent accusation that despite what she claimed Harris had never worked at McDonald’s. Someone in the crowd shouted back: ‘She worked on a corner.’ As Harris reports, ‘Trump loved that. He laughed and pointed to the guy, encouraging the audience to cheer him. “This place is amazing!” Show him a gutter and he crawled right into it.’ She contrasts this cesspit with what took place where she was that night, in Charlotte. ‘I was onstage with a man who seeks to lift people up. The Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation has been building affordable housing and providing food in the rock star’s Soul Kitchen since 2006. I was proud to have his support.’ Of course, she is right that hers was much the more wholesome event. But there is another way to see this. Trump gave voice to a member of his audience and revelled in what he had to say. Harris gave voice to a faded rock star and revelled in his benevolence. Trump won in North Carolina by 3.2 per cent.

Could it have been different? Harris writes at points of missed opportunities to connect across the partisan divide:

Sometimes, as my motorcade moved through streets lined with supporters, I’d look out the window and see the one or two scowling people, arms outstretched, middle fingers raised. It pained me, especially if they had children standing alongside.

There are many good reasons that the Secret Service would have objected had I stopped the motorcade to speak with them. But I often wanted to. I wished I could ask every one of them: What are you angry about? What about me makes you angry? Is it your healthcare, your grocery bills, a backbreaking job that doesn’t pay what you’re worth – and what can I do to help you? An impossible wish, since I didn’t even control the lock on my car door. And there were always people waiting for me – sometimes for hours – at the next destination.

But even if she had managed to get out of the car, would she have had much to say in return? The problem is that Harris comes across as the same on stage and off, the public and private personas closely aligned: careful, poised, self-conscious, sometimes prickly, a little too ready to stand on ceremony when she can’t find the right words. In her tightly constructed world there was simply not enough give. It was Harris, not Trump, who turned out to be the what-you-see-is-what-you-get candidate. Maybe she should have told the world that Trump is nicer than he looks, that the scowl is just an act and his supporters are the ones being played. It might not have helped. But it couldn’t have gone any worse.