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Former Vice President Kamala Harris revealed in her new book, “107 Days,” that she had quietly tapped Denis McDonough as her choice for chief of staff in the event she won the 2024 presidential election.
While Harris admitted that 107 days “were not, in the end, long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency,” her memoir revealed that White House transition plans were already in motion for her to assume the presidency.
“We’d planned for everything, it seemed, except the actual result,” Harris wrote.
Harris said she decided in early October 2024 that McDonough would be her chief of staff and disclosed in the book that he had already accepted the offer more than a month before Election Day.
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The former vice president described McDonough as a “deeply caring man who doesn’t mince words,” and said she knew he would “run a productive and disciplined West Wing.”
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“Denis McDonough had been Barack Obama’s chief of staff in his second term, chief of staff at the National Security Council before that, and had served as secretary of Veterans Affairs in our administration,” Harris wrote in the book.
McDonough had most recently served as Secretary of Veteran Affairs for President Joe Biden’s administration. He was chief of staff to former President Barack Obama from Feb. 2013 to Jan. 2017. McDonough also served as Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from Oct. 2010 to Jan. 2013.
“One of the first public events I did as VP was with Denis. It was the height of COVID. He and his wife, Karin, and Doug and I took heart-shaped cookies to the nurses at the VA hospital on Valentine’s Day. The son of Irish immigrants, one of eleven children, he taught school in Belize before coming to work in government,” Harris wrote of McDonough.
The final chapters of Harris’ memoir detailed her disbelief as the election results rolled in.
Harris said her team had planned for “all kinds of contingencies,” including that “Trump might win Pennsylvania and claim premature victory, that we might win narrowly and Trump’s supporters would react with violent rejection of the result, that the count might drag on for days.”
But Harris said they didn’t expect to lose. Harris described in the book how her social secretary, Storm Horncastle, had ordered champagne and specially decorated cupcakes.
“She quietly went to the kitchen and hid all signs of celebratory preparation. She painstakingly peeled icing that read ‘Madame President’ off the top of each cupcake. Having converted them to innocuous comfort food, she sent them out, along with more wine, in case people needed it,” Harris recalled in the book.
President Donald Trump ultimately defeated Harris in the 2024 presidential election, securing 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226. Her 107-day campaign was the shortest presidential campaign in modern history after Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, 2024.
McDonough did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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