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Former Vice President Kamala Harris said she tried to reach out to former President Joe Biden after his cancer diagnosis but her call went to voicemail and was ignored during an interview with an interview with MSNBC's The Weekend that aired on Sunday (October 12).
“I called him earlier,” Harris said. “I have not talked to him. I just left him a message after I heard the news.”
“I think Joe Biden is a fighter, and that is what I told him," she added. “He’s going to fight this, and we’re going to hold him up and pray for his recovery and for his strength and for his family.”
Harris blasted Biden's decision to run for a second term in her recently published memoir 107 Days. The former vice president wrote that she was "in the worst position" to be the one to advise Biden to drop out of the 2024 election as she would seem "incredibly self-serving" and noted that it was ultimately up to the then-president and his wife, former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, though fearing a loss to then-former President Donald Trump.
"And of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out," Harris wrote. "I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win.
"'It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.' We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."
Harris said she didn't interject because she's a "loyal person" and acknowledged that “the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup" of Biden and Trump.
"During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again," Harris wrote. "He was, by some measures, the most consistently underestimated man in Washington. He’d been right about his tactics for pushing his agenda through a resistant Congress."
Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee after he announced his decision to end his campaign in July 2024 and was defeated by President Trump after she ran the shortest presidential campaign in American history.