From Out of the Loop: My Two Years as Vice President, by Kamala Harris

Page 67:

. . . and when I came back to the room, President Biden was already standing and waving the military leaders away.

“You missed the big meeting,” he said to me. “We already decided a bunch of stuff about the Afghani­stan situation. It was a really interesting meeting. A lot of stuff happened. Some of the people were angry but then some of them were smiling too, so it was hard to know what was going on all the time.”

“Joe!” I shouted. “I asked you to wait for me to return from my meeting before you made any decisions about Afghanistan!”

The president looked at me blankly.

“I told you, remember?” I said. “We were standing right here and I looked right at you and said, ‘I’m going to work on the Biden-Harris infrastructure bill and I’ll be back in two hours. Don’t do anything until I get back.’ Remember? I left you a banana?”

The president nodded and smiled. This was something he did when he had no idea what was happening but wanted to look like he understood.

“Joe, who am I?” I asked.

He nodded and smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

I knew we were in trouble.

“I’m Kamala Harris,” I said, pointing to the name tag on my shirt. Earlier that month I had decided that everyone close to the president should be wearing a name tag when interacting with him. It would make it easier — and less embarrassing for him — if he had our names and faces close together.

“We’re going to have pie tonight,” he said. “Mom promised.”

It was then that I realized that the president’s plan for Afghani­stan was going to be a disaster, and that as vice president I could do little to stop it. The next few hours I spent frantically working the phones, trying to get our allies informed and organizing the airlifts. I had a map of Kabul and its airfields in my office and plotted a way for our forces to maintain control of the Afghan airspace. All to no avail. As vice president, constitutionally, I had no authority over or responsibility for the unfolding disaster.

It’s pointless, of course, almost four years later, to play the blame game. But the blame falls squarely on former president Biden, and as I’ve made abundantly clear, I had little or nothing to do with . . .

Page 87:

. . . in his robe and slippers and eating his nightly pudding. I had come to tell him that the infrastructure bill was making its way through the Senate and that I had come up with an economic plan — what eventually became the Harris Plan to Restore American Competi­tive­ness, a cornerstone of my first year as president — but he was, like many people his age, watching Tucker Carlson.

Carlson was showing pictures of the Afghanistan debacle — which, again, I had zero to do with and wasn’t even in the room for — and the president kept gesturing to the screen as he spooned up his nightly pudding.

“What on earth?” he said in his feeble voice. “Who did that?”

“You did it,” I said. “You did it, Joe.”

His face brightened.

“We did it?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said. “You did that one.”

Page 101:

. . . uncontrollable bursts of laughter, which many people — mostly racists and Republicans — thought were inappropriate to the occasion, where for the first time in American history a president had been removed under section four of the 25th Amendment and a vice president sworn in. But the truth is, I wasn’t laughing because I thought something was funny. I was laughing in celebration that a woman had finally become president of the United States.

I was also laughing because the former president was still in the room and standing behind me, which I thought might be awkward until it was clear that he really didn’t know what, exactly, had transpired. As I finished taking the oath of office former president Joe Biden placed his left hand on my right buttock and leaned into my hair and said, “I smell cookies!”

What could I do but laugh? Laughter really is the best medicine.

Page 213:

. . . remains a constitutional question, even though it’s pretty much settled law. When I became president, I was finishing out the term of the previous president, which means that I can run another two times! Think of all of the great things I can accomplish in what will amount to ten years in the Oval Office! If you’re a history buff, imagine what Lyndon Johnson might have accomplished had he served another four years as president.

President Kamala Harris! It’s hard not to laugh!