How Biden's White House hid his decline

It was a presidency without a president

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I made a return after some time to the pages of The Guardian today, with an article about how Trump tried to turn America’s public broadcasters like Voice of America into propaganda channels in his first administration, and how it looks like he’s fixing to do it again. More op-eds to come soon!

Meanwhile, there’s an interesting new deep dive out about how the Biden White House hid the president’s diminishing mental capabilities. It contains some new details, including confirmation that Biden’s decline started very soon in his presidency. As early as 2021, national security aides were being told to reschedule meetings for another day because “he has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day”.

The big take-away from the piece is that for years, the Biden White House ran the president’s life and schedule in order to minimize his contact with anyone who might notice that he was undergoing cognitive decline. He met much less frequently with pretty much everyone - politicians, officials, donors, the media - and the encounters that he did have were often tightly scripted. Donors report being given question to ask him in advance and then witnessing him still go on to flub the answers.

This was possible in part because Biden was surrounded by a tight circle of aides - people like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Ron Klain - who have been around Washington so long that were able to act as proxies for him. Rather than Biden dealing with other people himself, information and decisions came and went through this tight group.

Speaking as a historian, one thing that I find really frustrating about this is that we’ll probably never know exactly what passed between the inner circle and Biden. Were they literally just running everything themselves with him providing strategic direction on his “good days”? Or did he keep a close grip on some details? Because they’re the only ones who really know and they have no incentive to tell us the truth, it’s going to be really hard to figure that out.

But it’s also a situation that ought to scandalize American citizens. They voted for Joe Biden, but what they got was a presidency without a president - a White House that was run more or less by a group of people whose names are probably familiar to less than 1% of the population. You can argue that unelected bureaucrats are really running the show behind the scenes in every White House, but the extent to which that was true here really was perverse and abnormal.

And one of the ways that it was perverse and abnormal is that it was built on lies. The steps that the inner circle took to prevent the outside world from seeing what was going on showed that they knew something was up. Yet they chose to march on regardless until the situation got so out of hand that Biden went on a debate stage in Atlanta and was unable to string together basic sentences.

The people at the heart of this conspiracy probably fooled themselves as much as they fooled everyone else. Because they feared handing ammunition to Donald Trump, they thought the best thing to do was form a protective cocoon around Biden and just wheel him out for brief prepared moments. That they thought this would be enough to defeat Trump shows that they had an extremely poor understanding of the political moment they were living in. They were really bad at their jobs, and it goes without saying that they should never work in Democratic Party politics again.

The media also played a role here by not doing its job of exposing what was really going on. Part of the reason was that the Biden White House was more leak-proof than any in recent memory - very little real information came out of it, which made things harder for reporters. But at the end of the day, the job of reporters is to generate news, not passively report leaks - and given the tight-knit weirdness of Biden’s White House, they ought to have sensed that the inner circle was hiding something and ferreted it out.

But there was also an ideological propensity in the media to treat concerns about Biden’s age and infirmity as right-wing propaganda rather than a serious story worth investigating.

I experienced this myself. When Special Counsel Robert Hur released his report into Biden’s possession of classified material at insecure locations, he described Biden as an “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”. I was contacted shortly afterwards by a liberal media outlet (one for whom I had not worked before or since) who asked me to write a story about it. Yes, I said, I’d gladly write a story about how bad this was for the president’s political prospects. I soon heard back from the editor that they’d found someone else to do the piece - who went on to write a piece characterizing Hur’s report as a hit job.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the Biden presidency was actually pretty good. If anything, having a diminished president showed that the institution of the presidency itself is fairly robust. It’s able to coast along and notch up some wins even without an energetic figure at its center, provided the people elsewhere in the operation know what they’re doing. But the one thing that those people can’t do is be the nation’s figurehead and spokesman, and give them confidence that they live under competent leadership. In other words, they can’t win elections. And in a democracy, that’s ultimately the important test.