The Codger-in Chief

In the wake of last Thursday's debate, Biden's staffers and supporters are starting to paint a picture. As the curator of the Toddler-in-Chief thread, this picture is disturbing.

Photo by mari lezhava on Unsplash

Any time a political leader delivers a disastrous public performance, one of the interesting political dynamics to watch is how their coterie of staffers and supporters react. One of the reasons it was so easy to write The Toddler in Chief was that after every Trump screw-up, an invisible army of anonymous sources would rush to tell their behind-the-scenes tales to the Times and the Post and the Journal and Axios and Politico. All I had to do was read these accounts and add them to the (very tall) pile. Sure, it could be taxing at times, but there was never a paucity of data.

Until this past week, Joe Biden’s tenure as president has been a different story. By and large, his staff has been close-mouthed and disciplined. Even in the wake of critical junctures — like the haphazard U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — the tick-tock stories about Biden were scarce on unfavorable anecdotes. Even during stressful times, the picture that was usually painted of Biden was of, you know, an adult leader. While there have been sporadic articles about whether Biden’s age was an issue, they tended to encounter fierce pushback from his staff rather than support. This matched the description of him in the few Biden books and longform articles that have been published. The contrast with the Trump book industrial complex was stark.

After last Thursday’s debate debacle, however, the dynamic has shifted in multiple ways.

First, outer-ring staffers rushed to speak to reporters and lift the curtain a bit on whether Biden’s age is a thing. An example of this genre was Axios’ Alex Thompson Sunday missive leading with, “Joe Biden's close aides have carefully shielded him from people inside and outside the White House since the beginning of his presidency.” Thompson’s sources were anonymous White House residence staff and Chandler West, the Biden White House's former deputy director of photography. Not exactly inner circle but still in the White House.

Second, political reporters who were blindsided by Biden’s performance last Thursday are now beating the ground for stories and sources. As Semafor’s Max Tani explained, “The Biden White House and campaign communications team have spent the last several years scolding the press and deflecting questions about Biden’s age, dismissing them as a media fixation disproportionate to the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his lies about the results of the 2020 election, among other things.” I suspect that many of these reporters are pissed off at their highly-placed sources within the Biden White House for shooing them away from this kind of story in the weeks and months prior to the debate. That makes them work harder.¹

Third, some polling is coming in demonstrating that the debate hurt Biden — especially compared to his only viable substitute. This is causing some Democratic politicos to voice their concerns on the record and a lot more politicos to grouse to the press anonymously.

Finally, Biden’s family is clearly embarrassed and chagrined by what happened last Thursday. They are now taking the opportunity to let the press know that they ain’t happy with senior staff.

Mix all of these dynamics together and the result has been a tsunami of coverage that bears more of a passing resemblance to what I saw during the Toddler-in-Chief days. In other words, there are some disturbing parallels in how Biden's staffers are talking about him to the press when compared to Trump’s White House staffers. Furthermore, I strongly suspect the staffers now talking to the press are higher-ranking than, say, the deputy director of photography.

The overarching theme of these stories matches the Axios story quoted above: a senior staff determined to keep president Biden in a protective bubble.²

Consider the following examples, all published in the last twelve hours. First, Politico’s Eli Stokols, Elena Schneider, Jonathan Lemire, and Adam Cancyrn, “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”:

Over the course of his presidency, Joe Biden’s small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him, limiting his exposure to the media and outside advice — an effort to manage public perceptions of the oldest person to ever hold the office and tightly control his political operation.

But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.”

The debate, however, was so dismal for Biden that nobody could ignore it….

As a Democratic strategist in a battleground state put it: “The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now.” And, the strategist said, “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone.”

This article was based on interviews with more than two dozen people, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive subject.

You get the gist — it’s a disturbing read.³

Now let’s turn to Axios’ Alex Thompson, “‘Freaking the f*** out’: Turmoil in the White House over Biden”:

Biden's performance at the debate has left many of his own aides worried about his mental fitness, and angry about what they see as a lack of candor from Biden's senior aides.

"It's the first topic of every conversation," one White House official said. "Senior leadership has given us nothing. To act like it's business as usual is delusional."

Another official put it more bluntly: "Everyone is freaking the f*** out."

"The uncertainty after Thursday is palpable and anxiety is only increasing," a third White House official told Axios.

"People are looking for leadership and direction that they were told to trust, and hoped was there, but aren't yet feeling in what is now clearly a defining moment for this presidency."….

The lack of answers from senior aides has continued this week, leading to growing anger and resentment among many inside the Biden camp.⁴

Signs of a staff that feels excluded by both Biden and his handlers.

Finally, the most disturbing read is the New York Times’ Peter Baker, David Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Rogers, “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome”:

In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.

Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.

The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.

Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process….

The recent moments of disorientation generated concern among advisers and allies alike. He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6. The next day, he misstated the purpose of a new tranche of military aid to Ukraine when meeting with its president.

On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. On June 18, his soft-spoken tone and brief struggle to summon the name of his homeland security secretary at an immigration event unnerved some of his allies at the event, who traded alarmed looks and later described themselves as “shaken up,” as one put it. Mr. Biden recovered, and named Alejandro N. Mayorkas.

As Mr. Biden has aged, the White House has limited his encounters with reporters. While he frequently stops for a couple minutes to answer a question or two, as of Sunday, Mr. Biden had granted fewer interviews than any president of the modern era and fewer news conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan, according to statistics compiled by Martha Kumar, a longtime scholar of presidential communication.

The Times story also contains a staple of the Toddler thread: disturbing quotes from treaty allies:

A senior European official who was present said that there had been a noticeable decline in Mr. Biden’s physical state since the previous fall and that the Europeans had been “shocked” by what they saw. The president at times appeared “out of it,” the official said, and it was difficult to engage him in conversation while he was walking.

Ms. Meloni and the other leaders were acutely sensitive to Mr. Biden’s physical condition, discussing it privately among themselves, and they tried to avoid embarrassing him by slowing their own pace while walking with the president. When they worried that he did not seem poised and cameras were around, they closed ranks around him physically to shield him while he collected himself, the official said….

Asked if one could imagine putting Mr. Biden into the same room with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia today, a former U.S. official who had helped prepare for the trip went silent for a while, then said, “I just don’t know.” A former senior European official answered the same question by saying flatly, “No.”

That last paragraph is not reassuring. Like, at all.

Earlier today the Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg noted that, “All of the talk about how you can't criticize Biden ‘too much’ because he'll ‘dig in’ and be more stubborn, feels pretty similar” to the Toddler in Chief thread. As the curator of that thread, here are the disturbing parallels:

1. A raft of stories contradicting official White House claims about the president’s cognitive abilities;

2. Genuinely disturbing anecdotes suggesting that the President of the United States might not be up to the daily rigors of the job;

3. Staffers, subordinates, and supporters — all of whom have a rooting interest in the success of the president — confirming that something is amiss.

I want to be very clear: on his worst, most incoherent day, Joe Biden is a better president than Donald Trump. It ain’t close. I worry about Biden sitting down across from Putin, but I worry more about Trump sitting on Putin’s lap and asking if he has been a good boy. Donald Trump remains the most immature, developmentally delayed leader in American history. If Joe Biden is still on the ticket come November, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will vote for the older guy over the convicted felon and never think twice about it.

The more stories we hear about Biden’s current cognitive state, however, the more concerned I am that his staffers are signaling that there is a problem with the president. The fact that “he has his good days” is not reassuring. If there is more press coverage in the next week that echoes the last 24 hours, it will be catastrophic for Biden.⁵ Once staffers with a rooting interest in your success start dishing dirt, it is hard to recover.

As these stories come trickling out, either Joe Biden needs to insert himself into the public eye and prove all these reports to be wrong — or he and his senior staff need to make a choice they obviously do not want to make.

Hopefully, the final difference between the Codger-in-Chief and the Toddler-in-Chief is that, whatever his flaws, the codger still acts in the national interest of the United States.

1. There is also the mea culpa kind of essay: see Franklin Foer’s latest in the Atlantic for an example of that genre.

2. One of the dynamics going on here is that junior staffers are upset about being shut out by senior staffers. That partially explains the motivation to talk to the press — but tht doesn’t mean that what they are leaking is wrong.

3. It is interesting to see how the Covid-19 bubble that Biden had at the very start of his presidency played a path-dependent role in keeping him with an insular crowd.

4. It looks like Biden’s donors are feeling a similar anger. According to CNN, Biden campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon said in a call to the campaign’s National Finance Committee about Biden: “He’s probably in better health than most of us.” CNN reported one person on the call, “said the comments were offensive and dismissive of the real concerns about Biden in the wake of his debate performance.”

5. A helpful reminder that the more Trump surges into the lead, the more the press has an obligation to critically examine exactly what Trump has promised to do if re-elected.