“2024:” Reporters recount how their access to presidential candidates’ campaigns shaped book about 2024 election
Article by Hope Katz Gibbs • Edited by Amy Fickling for The Wire
“Our goal was to make this the definitive and most comprehensive book about the 2024 election,” New York Times White House correspondent Tyler Pager told a National Press Club crowd at a July 22 Headliners Book Event. Appearing with one of his co-authors, White House reporter Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post, the two together made the case that they’d accomplished their goal with the 400-page “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.”
Hundreds of interviews are chronicled as a multitude of inside stories and accounts from the presidential campaign trail take readers through 24 chapters on Comebacks, the Rematch, and the Shakeup. “2024” is the story of the election that tested American democracy and reshaped the world.
The authors said their beats gave them extraordinary access to President Donald Trump and his advisers, as well as to the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris teams. Their coverage of speeches, debates, and rallies — including the outdoor event in Butler, Pennsylvania, where then-candidate Trump was shot — enabled each of the award-winning writers to let readers glimpse beyond the public events to the inner workings of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.
“The whole world was against me. And I won,” Trump told the authors 10 days before his second inauguration. But their research began long before, in August 2022, when the FBI searched his Palm Beach, Florida, estate, Mar-a-Lago, looking for classified documents.
One of the big questions the authors wanted to answer in the book was how the first U.S. president to become a convicted felon regained control of the White House.
Pager and Arnsdorf explained that Trump’s ability to stifle the rise of Republican opponents, including Ron DeSantis, is partly due to a winning strategy developed by Susie Wiles, an American political consultant and lobbyist who is now the 32nd White House chief of staff.
Her close relationship with Trump was built on similar traumatic life experiences that bonded them, Arnsdorf said. “She was there for him when he was at his lowest after the January 6 attack, and Trump felt she helped him win Florida.”
The book also details how President Biden and his team ignored tanking poll numbers, minimized concerns about his age, and fended off younger Democrats to stay in the race. Following his disastrous debate performance vs. Trump and subsequent exit from re-election efforts, they pick up coverage of Vice President Harris’ 107-day campaign, the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history.
Trump was willing to be interviewed for the book, Pager said, but he repeatedly attempted to reach Biden by phone. “I finally got his phone number and called him several times, and twice he did pick up,” he said. However, no conversation of length was had, and eventually, that cellphone account was closed. “Several of Biden’s aides contacted me to say they weren’t happy that I’d even tried to call the president. But it’s my job; I had his phone number, and I had to try.”
Moderator Emily Wilkins, correspondent for CNBC’s Washington, D.C., bureau and immediate past president of the Press Club, used her final question for the co-authors to ask if they are planning to write “2028.”
“We wouldn’t rule that out,” Arnsdorf replied. The book’s third co-author, Josh Dawsey, former Washington Post White House reporter who currently is covering politics for The Wall Street Journal, wasn’t able to attend the evening event.
About the authors
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 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 D.C.