Former Vice President Kamala Harris, in an exclusive interview with Rachel Maddow, talks about how she faced the challenge of asserting herself on whether Joe Biden should have been running for reelection in 2024.

MADDOW: We’re here live with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Her new book about her 2024 run for the presidency is called “107 Days.” It’s out tomorrow. Madam Vice President, I have to ask you about the — I think the point — the part of your book that has people most upset thus far, which is some of your writing about the decision around the president abandoning his reelection campaign, the timing there and how it was handled. You say in part, page 46: “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision. We all said that like a mantra as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.” Whose decision should that have been? How should that decision have been made? HARRIS: So, when I write this, it’s because I realize that I have and had a certain responsibility that I should have followed through on, which is — and so, when I talk about the recklessness, as much as anything, I’m talking about myself. There was so much, as we know, at stake. And, as I write, the — where my head was at, at the time is that it would be completely — it would come off as being completely self-serving. MADDOW: If you said to President Biden… HARRIS: If I… MADDOW: … that you did not think you should run again. HARRIS: Yes, or even that he should question whether it’s a good idea. But I think that one of the reasons I wrote this book, Rachel, is — there are actually a number of reasons. One is, one, that it is unprecedented, right, to your point of what you said in your opening. We had a president of the United States running for reelection, 3.5 months from the election decides not to run. The sitting vice president enters the race against a former president of the United States who has been running for 10 years with 107 days to go. And it ended up being the closest presidential election in the 21st century. And there was so much about those 107 days that, for me — and this is really a behind-the-scenes look at those 107 days — was about seeing people who seemingly had nothing in common coming together by the thousands with a level of optimism and, dare I say, joy about the possibilities for America. And I hope to remind people about that light that people brought to it and to remind people that that light is still there. And we can’t let that be extinguished by an election or the individual who’s in the office right now, because, to the point of all those folks who got out in protest about the Kimmel suspension and… MADDOW: And about everything else that people are protesting. HARRIS: Right, in the variety of ways, whether it be going to a protest, or being with their pocketbook, or getting engaged in local and state and federal elections. They will make a difference. And they have made a difference.

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