There’s an almost gothic horror to the opening scene of Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Joe Biden, days away from a nationally televised debate that may determine the future of the republic, wanders out into the sun at Camp David, collapses into a deckchair, and falls asleep. “He didn’t know what Trump had been saying,” recalls Ron Klain, his former chief of staff and the man overseeing his debate prep. “He couldn’t grasp what the back and forth was.” When Klain tries to refocus him on domestic policy, Biden pushes back: Macron thinks I’m doing a great job. So does Scholz. “These guys say I’m a great president.”
Whipple doesn’t have to editorialise. His style is one of establishment proximity—source-rich, anecdote-heavy, New Yorker-ish in tone, though without the pretension or range. The data points accumulate like mould on a curtain. Biden “shuffled stiffly” to a podium. He couldn’t remember what he’d already said. He confused the names of foreign leaders. He required a teleprompter even at intimate donor gatherings. His team, in a moment of almost comic self-awareness, joked that they could no longer use Covid as an excuse to keep him in the basement. What now? “What do we do?” they asked each other.
What Uncharted offers is not news—Biden’s decline has been evident for years—but confirmation. This is the insider account from a journalist granted access, or at least enough of it to build a convincing facsimile. Whipple is an archivist of bourgeois consensus. His books on the presidency and national security bureaucracy, including The Gatekeepers and The Spymasters, read like odes to institutional memory. But here, the memory is failing, quite literally. The core drama of Uncharted is that Biden is too old to run for reelection, everyone around him knows it, and no one can, or will, do anything about it.
Whipple is an archivist of bourgeois consensus. His books on the presidency and national security bureaucracy, including The Gatekeepers and The Spymasters, read like odes to institutional memory. But here, the memory is failing, quite literally.
Whipple has no particular ideological axe to grind. He’s a process guy. His anger is procedural, his tone that of a betrayed technocrat: how did they let this happen? And in this sense, he captures something essential about the American liberal elite’s breakdown. Uncharted is not just the story of a faltering man; it is the story of a party, a class, and an ideology so brittle that it mistook denial for strategy. Biden was meant to be a transitional figure, a stopgap. That he ended up staying too long is not the real failure. The failure is that there was no plan for when he didn’t make it.
By the time of the debate in Atlanta, the crisis had long since passed the point of containment. Biden’s voice, Whipple writes, was “so soft it was almost a whisper.” At one point he declares, “We finally beat Medicare.” When it ends, his wife assures him: “You knew all the facts.” Valerie Biden Owens calls a family friend in tears, demanding to know what had been done to her brother at Camp David. “How could they make him up like that?” she asks. “He had a good tan. He looked good.” In her mind, and perhaps in Biden’s too, the problem wasn’t the frailty or the confusion but the camera angle and the make-up. His team, like a decaying royal household, obsessed over optics while the monarchy crumbled around them.
The title of Whipple’s book gestures at contingency. But nothing in it feels uncharted. On the contrary, the collapse is structurally determined. There is no sense, even in the early chapters, that any other outcome was likely. The Democratic Party is portrayed as so hollowed-out by its own triangulations, so dependent on donor logic and gerontocratic authority, that it had no capacity to generate alternatives. Whipple is blunt: Biden’s top advisers never discussed whether he was too old to run again. They couldn’t. “They walled Biden off from the outside world,” he writes. No one asked the obvious questions because everyone knew the answers.
If Biden is the tragic figure at the centre of Uncharted, Kamala Harris is the Greek chorus, watching in silence as the play unfolds. She is conspicuously absent for much of the first half. When she reappears as the nominee following Biden’s late withdrawal, the narrative tone shifts from elegy to farce. Harris had been widely dismissed—by donors, by the party’s media allies, by much of the electorate—as underwhelming. Whipple notes that she never fully took control of the Biden campaign apparatus, which had been built around insulating him from scrutiny. She inherited the machinery but not the mandate. What follows is a brief flicker of hope, then collapse. Trump wins.
Kamala Harris is the Greek chorus, watching in silence as the play unfolds. She is conspicuously absent for much of the first half. When she reappears as the nominee following Biden’s late withdrawal, the narrative tone shifts from elegy to farce.
Whipple’s chapter on Trump’s campaign is less urgent, in part because its trajectory is more familiar. The same cast of ghouls returns: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Brad Parscale, the Kushners, Susie Wiles. Whipple is efficient with character sketches, Manafort appears like a well-lubricated corpse in ostrich leather, Parscale as a malfunctioning algorithm in a red Ferrari, but the narrative arc is conventional. Trump remains, as always, in motion: vengeful, improvisational, media-savvy, always adapting. The contrast with Biden is not one of charisma, or even competence, but dynamism. Trump’s team wants to do something. Biden’s team wants to stop things from happening.
What emerges, unintentionally, is a study in dominant class renewal. The American right, for all its brutality and incoherence, has a political project. It understands power. The liberal centre, by contrast, has degenerated into geriatric management. There is no clearer metaphor than the Biden campaign’s central strategic goal: to keep the candidate awake, upright, and out of trouble. In this, they succeeded for a while. But the strategy could not survive contact with the electorate. “Where did that voice go?” a family friend asks Biden after the debate. “What the fuck happened to this guy?” The answer, Whipple suggests, is nothing. This was the guy.
Whipple’s central insight, that no one in Biden’s inner circle had either the will or the standing to stop him, is damning, but too limited. The real problem was not just the absence of dissent. It was the structure that made dissent irrelevant. Biden had already locked up the nomination by the time his cognitive decline became undeniable. His grip on the party apparatus, bolstered by Obama-era networks, donor dependency, and the structural weakness of the Democratic left, made challenge impossible. When he eventually withdrew, there was no primary process left to legitimise a successor. Harris was simply crowned, and sent to the slaughter.
The book’s subtitle promises the “wildest campaign in history,” but there is little chaos here, only entropy. The events Whipple narrates do not feel wild but weighted, dragged down by the mass of accumulated institutional dysfunction. The Democratic Party is not just sclerotic but death-bound. The 2024 election becomes less a contest of vision than a test of stamina: which dying machine can keep moving just long enough to win?
The 2024 election becomes less a contest of vision than a test of stamina: which dying machine can keep moving just long enough to win?
There are, here and there, glimpses of another story. Whipple alludes to the role of the media, especially The New York Times, in undermining Biden, but he does not dwell on the press as an institution of power in its own right. The role of Silicon Valley and platform capital is gestured at, mainly through cameos by tech billionaires at fundraisers. The Republican voter suppression apparatus is mentioned but not explored. And perhaps most strikingly, there is little serious treatment of the working-class base—white, Black or Latino—that Biden had once claimed to represent.
The only real constant across the narrative is elite panic. From the Aspen conferences where “the rich people” beg Biden to step down, to the Biden beach house where decisions are made in isolation and anger, the story remains confined to the dominant class. And yet Whipple never quite interrogates this class as such. It is not Biden’s cognitive decline that has most clearly endangered American democracy, but the conditions that made that decline unspeakable. Those conditions remain intact.
One of the few genuinely illuminating episodes involves Barack Obama, who emerges in the second half of the book as the ghost haunting Biden’s final act. The relationship between the two men is captured in a single phrase: “Biden was more loyal to Obama than Obama ever was to him.” Whipple hints at Obama’s role in blocking Biden’s 2016 ambitions, in backing Hillary Clinton, and in quietly encouraging donor networks to prepare alternatives. But he stops short of describing Obama as a political actor with agency. The loyalty, in Whipple’s telling, is personal. But it was always political. Obama, like many in the party elite, wanted a version of change that would not threaten capital. Biden’s sentimentalism was useful. Until it wasn’t.
Whipple’s closing chapters veer toward moral reckoning. There is anger, finger-pointing, despair. Klain blames the donors. Valerie Biden blames the debate team. Harris blames the lack of support. The Democratic base, Whipple implies, just wanted someone who could win. But no one could say so. “Only Biden could surrender those delegates,” he writes. “Only he could decide to forego his reelection bid.” It is a remarkable portrait of executive power: formally absolute, substantively incapacitated. The death drive of American liberalism, in Whipple’s account, is procedural.
The Trump campaign, by contrast, comes across as sordid but vital. There are allegations of illicit foreign donations, resurfaced footage of assaults, even internal coups. But nothing stops the machine. Trump is convicted of 34 felonies. He is accused, again, of sexual abuse. And he still wins. The conclusion Whipple avoids, but cannot quite escape, is that Trumpism functions because it promises to do things, hurt enemies, offshore prisoners, cut taxes, build walls, impose order. Bidenism, in contrast, promises only survival. And in 2024, it could not even offer that.
The book ends where it began: with silence, isolation, decay. Biden, at his Delaware beach house, is “miserable and suffering from COVID, isolated… and feeling abandoned.” The presidency, once pitched as a return to stability, has collapsed into a management crisis. Whipple, despite himself, offers a devastating indictment of liberalism’s exhaustion. The man meant to save democracy could barely finish a sentence. And the party that nominated him had no plan for when he fell.
In the final analysis, Uncharted is less about Trump than about what remains after the centre fails. It is a record of decline without resistance, crisis without renewal. Its great strength is its access. Its great weakness is its inability to make meaning of what it finds. Whipple catalogues the end of something, a political style, an institutional generation, an imperial fantasy, but cannot name what comes next. His subtitle calls it the wildest campaign. In fact, it may be the last one of its kind.
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