What does it teach us about Trump?

What is Kamala Harris’ new book, 107 Days, supposed to be exactly? Is it a memoir about her historically short campaign against the most formidable Republican candidate since the Gipper? Is it an apology for losing that election and changing the course of American history? Or is it a warning to other political candidates that neoliberalism is no longer a winning strategy for the Democrats, and to restrategize while we still have free and fair elections?

Man, I don’t know. I read it when it was released last week, and I’m still stuck on a detail about how one of the most powerful women in the world was batch-freezing home-cooked meals so that her adult husband would have something to eat while she worked as the vice president of the United States. What a scene to set a mere 39 pages into her book: Harris is playing Border Czar and Doug Emhoff is defrosting vegetarian chili in an old microwave.

By Kamala Harris. Simon & Schuster.

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It’s not surprising Harris would write a book about her uniquely hamstrung campaign and her gutting, history-defining loss. Hillary Clinton did something similar after she lost in 2016 with her book, What Happened. But Clinton’s book came out when we were collectively still stunned at the prospect of a Trump presidency. Harris’ book is being released into a world where everyone knows exactly what’s happening, but no one really knows what to do about it. Harris, it seems, has no real answers either. “I wanted a seat at the table. I wanted to make change from inside the system,” she writes. “Today I’m no longer sure about that.”

If you plug your ears and cover your eyes and scream as loud as possible, you can read much of the book as if you live in a world where Harris won. Nearly every chapter is but one day of her campaign, and several of them end with motivational pablum. On Day 106, she leads a crowd in a rallying cry that when we fight, “we win!” But “we” lost, quite famously, didn’t we! Such is the key trouble with 107 Days, and books like it, where the politician author is unable or unwilling to adjudicate their own failings. What’s the point of reading about a political failure if there’s nothing to learn from it for our shaky future?

The book spans her entire campaign, but it’s mostly over by the time she loses and certifies Trump’s reelection. Because the book is in a daily diary format, there’s no room for introspection or hindsight; instead, we’re left with little details about debate prep and Biden gaffes. A more interesting book starts at her loss, instead of leading us through the heady campaign that, frankly, doesn’t matter anymore. The despair of living through this Trump term makes it clear how little her campaign mattered: the little decisions around ads, around slogans, around debate sound bites. If she doesn’t have a vision for the political path forward, the least she could do is tell us what it feels like for her to watch the carnage unfold.

But that’s not the book Harris wrote. Instead, she leans into the same half-hearted rhetoric that lost her the election in the first place. She says she was merely “ambivalent” about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then offers this literary pivot of the century: “What I’m not ambivalent about is Israel’s security.” It’s a laughable sentiment even in Israel, where many locals want an immediate military de-escalation. This MFA-dropout prose reads like snippets from a Veep episode deemed too inglorious for even Selina Meyer.

It’s impossible to read 107 Days without looking for mentions of Gaza, or specifically, for Harris to recognize how much her campaign suffered for its tacit support of the genocide. Still, you won’t find her recognizing that perhaps a more strident support of Palestinian people would have won her more Arab American votes. “For any enduring peace, we have to let go of extreme rhetoric on both sides,” she writes. “I wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian.” The blame is placed squarely on the protester or the voter—or, as was her problem ultimately, the nonvoter.

It’s details like this that Harris wants to hide in the folds of schlocky writing. It works only if you haven’t been paying attention for the past few years. Harris writes about a moment a few days into her campaign, where she spoke to the press about Gaza: “To everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you. Let’s get the deal done.” It sounds nice, if you’re under some impression that this impassioned speech led to any kind of deal at all. Very West Wing!

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If you’re looking for a clear villain in 107 Days, the closest you get might be Dr. Jill Biden. She’s written about sparingly but only as the overprotective, sometimes insulting first lady who was blinded by her need to protect her husband’s political memory. There are very few real revelations in the book, but one small one is Harris’ husband losing his temper after Dr. Biden asked if he and Harris were still loyal to them. “They hide you away for four years, give you impossible, shit jobs, don’t correct the record when those tasks are mischaracterized, never fight back when you’re attacked, never praise your accomplishments,” he said. “And still, they have to ask if we’re loyal?” It’s a great question left unanswered by the book, and by Harris’ own political ideology. Loyal to who: party, country, or political iconoclast?

As with most projects after a failed election bid, 107 Days is mostly preoccupied with protecting Harris’ legacy, and by extension, the Democrats. She seems quietly radicalized by her loss, though more into seeking different employment, not in a way that’s changed her core beliefs about the party she dedicated much of her life to. She knows that the strategy set before her by Biden’s camp, and then by her own team, failed; she seems unwilling to admit that she was responsible for so much of that failure.

The ultimate thesis of 107 Days is similar to what Harris told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show last month: “I don’t want to go back in the system. I think it’s broken.” She isn’t seeking reelection and instead wants to “talk with people and I don’t want it to be transactional where I’m asking for their vote.”

She’s right, but she’s late. Harris comes to the conclusion that the system is broken only when her efforts to ascend to its highest reaches are fully rejected. It’s only through her own ambition that she sees the flaw in the design of America: She was good and smart and charming and beautiful and it still wasn’t enough. But in the same interview, Colbert asks her who the new leaders of the Democrats are, and Harris refuses to give a name—she doesn’t even mention Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for mayor in New York and target of Trump’s ire, to whom she’s only given a lukewarm endorsement.

Months after her loss, Harris still makes the same mistakes about what she thinks Americans want. Maybe she doesn’t actually understand where she got it all wrong, and seeking insight from her is a futile mission. There’s always something to learn from history’s losers, but not if they’re still invested in their own myth-making.

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