But Parnes and Allen devote the first half of their book to Biden’s long, painful, public decline, leading to his historic decision to step aside while in office and eligible for a second four-year term.

Part one of Fight is called The Unmaking of the President, a nod to The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H White’s seminal book on John F Kennedy’s win over Richard Nixon. Part two is called What It Took, a reference to Richard Ben Cramer’s classic on the 1988 election – in which Biden plays a prominent part as a young Democratic senator whose first presidential campaign crashed and burned in public.

When he dropped out in 1987, Biden was 44. In 2020, when his third presidential run ended in victory over Trump, he was 77. In 2023, after two years as the oldest president ever inaugurated, he was past 80 – and showing it.

“A handful of Democratic National Committee officials already had considered contingency plans,” Allen and Parnes write. “In hush-hush talks starting in 2023, these officials gamed out Biden-withdrawal scenarios, according to two people familiar with them.

“They wanted to make sure the party was ready for every possible circumstance: if Biden launched his campaign and then stepped aside before the primaries; if he won a bunch of primaries and then could not continue. If he secured enough delegates for winning the nomination but dropped out before winning a floor vote at the convention, and if he left a vacancy at the top of the ticket after taking the nomination.”

According to Parnes and Allen, the “hush-hush” planning was focused on what party rules said would happen in any such scenario “and how they might need to be changed, if the president no longer had the desire, or the ability, to run”.

“One official involved in secret talks put a fine point on the fear that Biden would not make it to election day as the party’s nominee: ‘It shows what we had to do to prepare with the unique circumstances we had, which was an 80-plus-year-old president who was running.”

Biden remained determined, egged on by family including his wife Jill Biden and legally troubled son, Hunter Biden, and by veteran aides. Parnes and Allen describe tensions between such factions but also chaotic preparations for what turned out to be the only Biden-Trump debate. That 80-minute meeting took place in Atlanta, Georgia, on 27 June. Biden’s performance – stiff, confused and weak – has gone down in history as perhaps the most catastrophic of all time.

Still, it took nearly a month for party pressure to build to a sufficient pitch to force Biden to relinquish his grip on power.

In a particularly striking passage, Parnes and Allen describe a donors’ reception hosted by Phil Murphy, then governor of New Jersey, on 29 June 2024, two days after the debate disaster. Biden reportedly needed to have florescent tape fixed to the carpet, “colorful bread crumbs [that] showed the leader of the free world where to walk”.

“He knows to look for that,” one aide explained.

At the same event, Biden reportedly needed an autocue for “unscripted” remarks and then spoke haltingly in a Q&A with Murphy.

“He didn’t look well,” the authors write. “He didn’t sound vital.”

Such moments only increased party pressure. Allen and Parnes report an extraordinary conversation between Biden and Barack Obama, to whom Biden was vice-president between 2009 and 2017. In doing so, they quote Obama but present Biden’s thoughts in italics, indicative of close sourcing, perhaps from Biden himself.

“What is your path?” Obama asked.

“What’s my path? Biden thought as he listened to Obama. What’s your fucking plan?”

Such high drama is ultimately matched with brutal pathos. Parnes and Allen report how Obama and other party grandees eventually came to back Harris as the only alternative to Biden.

“One veteran operative summed up the sentiments of Democrats who worried they would get stuck with Harris but still wanted Biden out: ‘Well, at least she has a pulse.’”

Biden must Trump-proof US democracy, activists say: ‘There is a sense of urgency’

The skies above the White House were cold and grey. Joe Biden greeted the championship winning Boston Celtics basketball team, quipping about his Irish ancestry and tossing a basketball into the crowd. But the US president could not resist drawing a wider lesson.

“When we get knocked down, we get back up,” he said. “As my dad would say, ‘Just get up, Joe. Get up.’ Character to keep going and keep the faith, that’s the Celtic way of life. That’s sports. And that’s America.”

Such events continue to be among the ceremonial duties of a “lame duck” president with waning influence. Biden has cut a diminished figure in recent months, first surrendering his chance to seek re-election, then finding himself sidelined by the doomed presidential campaign of his vice-president, Kamala Harris.

But with his legacy imperiled by Donald Trump, the president is facing calls to mitigate the oncoming storm. Advocacy groups say Biden, who turned 82 this week, can still take actions during his final two months in office to accelerate spending on climate and healthcare, secure civil liberties, and Trump-proof at least some fundamentals of US democracy.

Trump’s signature campaign promise was a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. He has nominated officials including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, architects of family separations at the southern border during his first term, and vowed to use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The plans include mandatory detention, potentially trapping immigrants in inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is leading an opposition effort, urging Biden to halt the current expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facilities, especially those with records of human rights abuses.

Eunice Cho, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU national prison project, said Ice detention facilities “characterised by abusive conditions, pervasive neglect and utter disregard for the dignity of people in their custody” were key to Trump’s logistical plan.

Dozens of people have died in Ice detention facilities – mostly owned or operated by private prison corporations – over the past four years, according to the ACLU, and 95% of deaths would probably have been preventable had appropriate medical care been provided. Yet the Biden administration has backed new Ice detention facilities in states where they did not exist before, such as Kansas, Wyoming and Missouri.

“We are calling on the Biden administration to take action now, in the final days of the administration, to halt any efforts to expand immigration detention and to shut down specifically abusive facilities once and for all,” Cho told reporters on a Zoom call this week. “We don’t need to put down runway for the Trump administration to put in place these mass detention and deportation machines.”

She warned: “We know that the anti-immigrant policies of a second administration are going to be far more aggressive than what we saw in the first term, and mass arrest and detention is going to become perhaps the norm to create and carry out these deportation operations unless we can do all we can to put a halt to them.”

Another crucial area for Biden to make a last stand is criminal justice. In his first term, Trump oversaw the execution of more people than the previous 10 presidents combined. Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, then imposed a moratorium on federal executions in 2021.

Trump has indicated his intention to resume such executions and even expand the death penalty. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a public apology in 2013 while serving as Florida’s top law enforcement officer after she sought to delay the execution of a convicted killer because it conflicted with a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.

Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s capital punishment project, told reporters over Zoom that Trump said “he will work to expand the death penalty. He’s going to try to expand it to people who do not even commit killings. He’s called for expanding the death penalty to his political opponents.

“But perhaps most dangerously in Project 2025 [a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation thinktank] – and we believe every word of it is this – he promised to try to kill everyone on death row, and the reason why we have to believe this and take it so seriously is the record that Donald Trump left where he, in a span of six months, carried out 13 executions.”

The ACLU and other groups are therefore pressing Biden to commute the sentences of all individuals on federal death row to life in prison, fulfilling a campaign promise and preventing potential executions under Trump. Commuting “is really the thing that Biden can do to make it harder for Trump to restart executions”, Stubbs added.

Pastor Brandi Slaughter, a board member of the pressure group Death Penalty Action, told reporters this week: “We know what the next president plans to do if any prisoners are left under a sentence of death under the Biden administration. We’ve been there, we’ve done that.”

Biden has also received 8,000 petitions for clemency from federal prisoners serving non-death penalty sentences that he could either reduce or pardon. The former senator has long been criticised for his role in drawing up a 1994 crime law that led to the incarceration of thousands of Black men and women for drug offences.

This week, members of Congress including Ayanna Pressley and James Clyburn led 64 colleagues in sending a letter to Biden urging him to use his clemency power “to reunite families, address longstanding injustices in our legal system and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration”.

They were joined at a press conference on Capitol Hill by Maria Garza, 50, from Illinois, a prison reform advocate who spent 12 years in a state prison. She said in an interview: “There is a sense of urgency because a lot of the people that are sitting waiting for clemency are people that have de facto life sentences that will die in prison if they don’t [receive clemency]. A lot of their unjust sentencing was because of the 1994 crime bill that he was the founding father of.”

Mitzi Wall, whose 29-year-old son Jonathan is incarcerated on a seven-and-a-half-year federal cannabis charge, called on Biden to keep a campaign promise to grant clemency to more than 4,000 people in federal prison for nonviolent cannabis crimes.

“We voted for President Biden,” she said. “He gave us hope and we’re asking him to do nothing more than keep his promise.”

Wall, 63, from Maryland, added: “President Biden was partly responsible for writing the 1994 crime bill that thrust families into abject poverty and pain. I know he feels bad about that and he can right that wrong with the power of the pen. I’m appealing to him as a father whose son [Hunter] could very possibly be going to prison.”

In other efforts to protect civil liberties, the ACLU is recommending a moratorium on all federal government purchases of Americans’ personal data without a warrant. It is also asking Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act to prevent potential abuse of surveillance technologies under the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Trump has pledged to rescind unspent funds in Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare law and stop clean-energy development projects. White House officials are working against the clock to dole out billions of dollars in grants for existing programmes to minimise Trump’s ability to rescind or redirect these funds. Earlier this month, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, announced more than $3.4bn in grants for infrastructure projects across the country.

Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, notes that Trump will have the power of impoundment to stall the money flowing out of the government and can order rescissions to programmes funded by Congress.

“The singular thing that Joe Biden can do is expedite the flow of federal dollars in all the programmes,” Schiller said.

“Any money that is supposed to leave the treasury to go to schools, food safety, environmental protection – anything that is not yet distributed needs to get distributed. It’s like emptying literally the piggy bank before you go on a trip. President Biden needs to be literally getting as much money out the door in the hands of state, local and community organisations as he can.”

Another priority for the White House is getting Senate confirmation of as many federal judges as possible, given the potential impact of the judiciary in challenging Trump administration policies. The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organisation, noted: “Federal judges restricted hundreds of Trump administration policies during his first term, and will likely play a significant role in determining the trajectory of his second.”

Senate Republicans forced numerous procedural votes and late-night sessions this week in attempt to stall confirmations. Eventually a deal was struck that will bring Biden within striking distance of the 234 judicial confirmations that occurred in Trump’s first term – but four of Biden’s appellate court nominees will not be considered.

The outgoing president could also engage with Democratic-led states and localities to bolster protections and establish “firewalls” against Trump’s agenda, particularly in areas such as immigration. These collaborations could involve reinforcing sanctuary city policies and providing resources to states that are likely to face pressure from the Trump administration.

Chris Scott, former coalitions director for Harris, said: “What will be interesting is how or what can President Biden to work with states, especially where we have Democratic leadership in place, to be able to brace themselves and arm themselves with more protection. We already have places like a Michigan or Illinois where you have governors vowing to make sure that they have protections – even in the Trump presidency.”

As Barack Obama discovered before handing Trump the keys to the Oval Office in 2017, however, lame duck presidents can only do so much. Trump will come into office with a flurry of executive orders, a supportive Congress and fewer guardrails than the first time around.

Bill Galston, a former adviser in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “On January 20 Donald Trump will control all the instruments of government and, at that point, it’ll be up to the courts – and public opinion – to restrain him.”

More Trump voters say he is more responsible than Biden for economy: Survey

Voters who supported President Trump in the 2024 presidential election are more likely to hold him accountable for the current state of the economy than the previous administration, according to a survey.

The latest poll from The Wall Street Journal/YouGov shows 46 percent of Trump voters crediting the current president with the state of the economy, while 34 percent placed responsibility on former President Biden. Another 13 percent say they’re not sure, and 8 percent did not pick a side.

Meanwhile, 75 percent of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 supporters say Trump is responsible for the current economy, and 14 percent say Biden is responsible. Just 6 percent are not sure, and another 6 percent say neither are accountable, according to the survey.

Overall, 55 percent of Americans give Trump credit, while 23 percent give Biden credit, the results show.

The poll comes as the economy has seen a strong uptick in the financial markets, even as businesses face lingering uncertainty over the fate of Trump’s tariffs. At the same time, private-sector employment saw the first monthly decline in more than two years in June, according to an ADP National Employment Report released Wednesday.

In an earlier survey from The Economist/YouGov, conducted in early May, Trump voters were more likely to credit Biden with the economy — 55 percent — than they were to credit the president — at 32 percent.

Harris voters, meanwhile, were even more likely to say Trump was responsible for the state of the economy than they are now — at 81 percent — compared to the 9 percent who said at the time that the former president was responsible.

Overall, slightly fewer Americans — at 51 percent — held Trump responsible for the economy, while 28 percent said Biden was responsible in the previous poll.

The May poll came a month after Trump announced sweeping tariffs that sent the stock market tumbling. In a post on Truth Social in late April, Trump wrote, “This is Biden’s stock market, not Trump’s.”

Survey respondents were asked in both polls whether they agree with that statement — but were not told that Trump said it.

In the previous poll, 41 percent of Trump voters said they agreed with the statement, while 36 percent disagreed.

In the latest survey, as the stock market hits record highs, 46 percent of the president’s supporters say they disagree with the statement and 29 percent said the opposite. Another 26 percent are not sure.

The Wall Street Journal/YouGov survey was conducted June 17-20 and included 1,034 U.S. adults. It has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.

“I stayed engaged because I really cared about what I was doing. Many things I worked so damn hard [on], that I thought changed the country, are changing so rapidly,” Biden said, a reference to Trump’s ongoing bid to gut most of his policy achievements.

Biden later revealed, “I’m getting calls. I’m not going to go into it, I can’t. From a number of European leaders asking me to get engaged. I’m not, but I’m giving advice. Because things are different. You know, I often ask the question, if America doesn’t lead the world, who can? Not a joke. Not because of power. Who could put it together? And mistakes, today, have significantly greater consequences than they did 50 years ago.”

“How can you just walk away?” Biden asked. “You don’t see me out there publicly doing a lot of this. But I’m also dealing with a lot of Democrats and Republican colleagues, all of them, wanting to talk, not because they think I have the answer, just to bounce things off me.

“I’m not looking” for it, he added. “They asked to see me, I see them.”

Biden, who in May revealed he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, also said he’s “working like hell” to write a new, 500-page memoir documenting his presidency.

“They want me to just focus on the four years and talk about what happened and how it impacted on the world and/or if it did.”

“He’s been there less than six months in this term,” Chaffetz said at one point of Trump. Then he sycophantically asked prime-time host Sean Hannity: “Has he been wrong on anything? He hasn’t been wrong on anything.”

The over-the-top praise didn’t end there.

Chaffetz also issued a warning to any Republican lawmakers considering a no vote on Trump’s signature spending and tax legisltation, saying: “I dare you — dare you — to vote against the president on this, because your political career will be bye-bye.”

Critics online ridiculed the comments and responded to Chaffetz’s “wrong on anything” question with withering replies.

Other posts suggested Chaffetz was “really going through some things” and that he’d said the quiet part out loud with his challenge to lawmakers.