Foreign Affairs
2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America
Reviewed by Jessica T. Mathews
March/April 2026
Published on February 17, 2026
In an unusual collaboration, three veteran political reporters from competing newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) pooled their sources and experience to produce a definitive account of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign. Unlike most post-election tell-alls, this narrative is neither the winner’s story nor the loser’s, giving equal weight to the three main campaigns—Joe Biden’s, Donald Trump’s, and Kamala Harris’s. It does not support the widely held view that a Trump win was inevitable. A major finding is that the ambivalent ex-president decided to run again because the many prosecutions underway against him convinced him that retaking the White House was his best hope of evading jail. That fear made Trump a better, more focused candidate than he had been in 2016. By contrast, the Biden campaign seems to have been sleepwalking, listening only to itself, even though key advisers were fully—shockingly—aware of their candidate’s weakness as they prepared for what turned out to be a catastrophic debate with Trump.
In This Review
2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America
By Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf
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More by Jessica T. Mathews
Topics & Regions: United States Campaigns & Elections U.S. Politics
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