2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America - Hardcover

by Josh Dawsey (Author), Tyler Pager (Author), Isaac Arnsdorf (Author)

In 2024, award-winning reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf bring us the definitive, inside story of the most tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign in our history.

"An immersive and philosophical tour of an election whose outcome, [the authors] argue, was anything but inevitable." --The New York Times

"The whole world was against me, and I won," said Donald Trump in an exclusive interview, ten days before his second inauguration. Nearly four years after Trump's first turbulent presidency concluded in a violent attempt to overturn the election, he made a political comeback on a scale that stunned the nation. How did the first U.S. president to become a convicted felon regain control of the White House? And at what cost? 2024 is the explosive account of how Trump and his advisers overcame a dozen primary challengers, four indictments, two assassination attempts, and his own past mistakes to defeat the Democrats, and pave the way for a second term that would be far more aggressive and ruthless than the first.

Drawing on extraordinary access to the Trump, Biden, and Harris teams, 2024 takes readers beyond the speeches, rallies, and debates to reveal the innermost workings of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns. Beginning in August 2022 with the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, and Trump's subsequent decision to run once again for president, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf chart how Trump stifled the rise of Republican opponents, including Ron DeSantis, and how his campaign, led by Susie Wiles, landed on a winning strategy. They reveal in unrivaled detail how Joe Biden and his team brushed off concerns about his age, ignored polling numbers, and held off the next generation of eager Democratic hopefuls--even as Biden was dealing with his own special counsel investigation and the trial of his son Hunter. After his disastrous debate performance forced him to withdraw, Biden anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate and tasked her with running the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history. With only 107 days to distinguish herself from the past four years, Harris lacked the time or space to outrun Biden's shadow--a challenge in and of itself, but one which Biden would make even more difficult. On November 5th, 2024, Trump was elected the nation's forty-seventh president, and would return to power vindicated, emboldened, unrestrained, and burning for revenge.

Gripping, revelatory, and deeply reported, 2024 is the shocking inside story of the election that tested American democracy and would go on to shape the future of the free world.

Author Biography

Josh Dawsey is an investigative reporter focused on politics at The Wall Street Journal. He most recently worked as a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the Post in 2017 and covered the White House from 2017 to 2021. He was part of the team of journalists that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the newspaper's coverage of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and a team that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the role of the AR-15 in American life. He is also a two-time recipient of the White House Correspondents Association award for news reporting and a lecturer at the Allbritton Journalism Institute. Josh is a proud graduate of the University of South Carolina and the enthusiastic owner of a rambunctious rescue dog named Pepper.

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. He previously covered the White House at The Washington Post, where he won the 2022 Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency. He graduated as the valedictorian from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and with distinction from the University of Oxford, where he earned a master's degree in comparative social policy. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Isaac Arnsdorf covers the White House for The Washington Post. His reporting from the scene of the Trump assassination attempt was central to The Post's coverage that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. His first book, Finish What We Started, about the MAGA movement since January 6, was published in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.