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Nearly four years earlier, Joe Biden was knocking around his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware, the weekend of August 12, 2017, when he caught snatches of President Trump on television. The president was insisting the violent brawls between marching white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, were the fault of both sides.
Speaking before four American flags at his New Jersey golf club, Trump declared there was “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Incensed, Biden grabbed the phone and called “Mike D.,” Mike Donilon, his closest political confidant, who at 59 had the look and manner of a neighborhood priest. Gray hair, bushy eyebrows, glasses, hushed voice.
Like Biden, Donilon had grown up in an Irish-Catholic family. His mother was a local union organizer in South Providence, Rhode Island, and his father was president of the school board. Over four decades, he had become Biden’s gut check and a blend of John F. Kennedy’s two key advisers: his younger brother and strategist, Robert F. Kennedy, and Theodore Sorensen, his wordsmith.
Donilon moved to the deck at the back of his house because his cell phone had poor reception inside his Alexandria, Virginia, home.
Jolting videos of white nationalists streamed seemingly nonstop on cable news. Many carried flaming torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan, “blood and soil.” They marched defiantly onto the campus of the University of Virginia on the eve of the “Unite the Right” rally, protesting the removal of an outsized statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counter-protester, was killed on August 12 as the clashes continued and a self-avowed anti-Semite rammed his Dodge Challenger into a downtown crowd holding signs that read “Love,” “Solidarity” and “Black Lives Matter.”
“I have to speak out on this,” Biden told Donilon. “This is different. This is darker. It is more dangerous. This is really a fundamental threat to the country.”
Donilon could hear the profound alarm in Biden’s voice. Biden was often stirred emotionally and long-winded, but on Charlottesville, he was going on and on, even more than his usual length.
“What’s different about this moment in history is that the American people are going to have to stand up and defend the country’s values and the Constitution because they don’t have a president who is going to do it.”
Biden had never seen anything like Trump’s response, maybe in his lifetime. The president of the United States had given moral equivalency to those who stand against hate and the haters—safe harbor for white supremacists and Nazis who were willing to come out in the open.
“Unprecedented,” he said, using one of his favorite words. “Trump is breathing life into kind of the darkest, worst impulses in the country.”
“They didn’t even bother to cover their faces!” Biden exclaimed. “The reasons they felt they could do it there was because they believed they had the president of the United States in their corner.”
He was not going to sit idle. Could Donilon help him draft something—an article, an op-ed, a speech?
Up until then, Biden, age 74, a full six feet, had been out of office for seven months, after serving eight years as vice president. His hair was snow white and his face weathered by the years.
Biden had been trying to abide by the traditional rule for a previous administration: avoiding public comment on a new president. Let them get their sea legs. But he told Donilon the rule no longer applied.
“I have to speak,” he said. “I need to be a very clear voice.”
Biden argued if people stayed silent, the nation’s civic fabric would grow threadbare, with more terror in the streets. Trump was systemically attacking the courts, the press, and Congress—a vintage move by an autocrat to dismantle institutions constricting his power.
“Okay,” Donilon said. “I’ve got to get writing.” The old Biden was engaging again as if he still held office.
As Donilon went to work, Biden issued a tweet at 6:18 p.m. that Saturday: “There is only one side.”
It was classic Biden—declarative and righteous. And it picked up some traction on social media. But it was hardly a sensation. A former vice president was a fading brand.
Trump would not let go. On August 15, during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York, he maintained “there is blame on both sides” and there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Drafts flew back and forth between Biden and Donilon.
Donilon mulled over how to convey Biden’s urgency. What was the language? They agreed Biden needed to sound an alarm without sounding hysterical. How could he best confront—to use a phrase Biden had famously whispered after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010—this disturbing, “big fucking deal” American moment?
They were looking for a larger theme, even a framing that invoked Biden’s Catholic faith and spirituality. Something visceral, with a values component. Something that captured Biden’s optimism and the nation’s spirit. But what?
Donilon landed on “soul,” a word no one identified with Trump. Biden loved the word. Just right.
Within two weeks, an 816-word piece under Biden’s name ran in The Atlantic, with the headline, “We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation.”
“The crazed, angry faces illuminated by torches. The chants echoing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the 1930s,” Biden wrote. “The neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists emerging from dark rooms and remote fields and the anonymity of the web into the bright light of day.”
In the aftermath of the march, he wrote, “America’s moral conscience began to stir.”
After the essay ran, there was a new, rising intensity in Biden’s private speeches.
“Who thinks democracy is a given?” Biden asked corporate leaders at a closed event on September 19, 2017. “If you do, think again.”
Known as Mr. Silent, Donilon was an unusually good listener. Biden aides often forgot Donilon was on conference calls until Biden would wonder, “Mike D., are you there?”
Yes, just taking it all in, trying to think it through, Donilon would say.
But the silence served a purpose—crystallizing Biden’s aspirations. And this time, Donilon felt they had hit on something powerful with “soul.” In speechwriting, sometimes you did, sometimes you did not.
“The battle for the soul of the nation” did not resonate like JFK’s famous inaugural command, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” But it asked deeper, more fundamental questions: What is your country? What has it become under Trump?