President Joe Biden’s inner circle kept his interactions short and tightly scripted, allowing his declining energy levels to remain under wraps.
He also held other top lawmakers and even his own pollsters at arms-length, according to a damning new report in the Wall Street Journal.
The former senator and vice president has long surrounded himself with a small group of loyal advisers who, thanks to their deep knowledge of both the president and of Washington, serve as particularly effective proxies.
When Biden was elected president in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, aides limited in-person meetings to minimize his risk of exposure to the virus. They also wanted to prevent the types of gaffes and other rhetorical missteps that have characterized his long political career.
But after the pandemic, the barriers that had been erected between the president, high-ranking officials and the public hardened instead of softening, sources told the Journal.
Many of the sources chalked up the restricted access to an especially powerful inner circle, rather than a deliberate attempt to hide any age-related decline.
But regardless of their motives, the result was that the public was largely blindsided when the president struggled to string together a coherent argument in his first and only debate against his Republican challenger Donald Trump in late June.
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Over the past two years, Biden’s meetings with Cabinet officials have been “relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted,” according to the Journal‘s report. Cabinet members often met with senior advisers, who then brought the issue to the president before reporting back.
When the president did show up, aides seemed to do an excessive amount of hand-holding, sources said. As the president’s energy seemed to wane, his “eager beaver” staff were quick to jump in and handle things for him, Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV) told the Journal.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates told the Journal that Biden meets regularly with key Cabinet members, and that in every administration it’s normal for people to want to spend more time with the president than what’s available.
He added that any close handling was related to concerns about Biden’s propensity to over-share, not his age or mental acuity, and that senior staff executed Biden’s agenda under his direction.
A source familiar with the Journal’s reporting also told the Daily Beast that some cabinet members, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, disputed the article’s claims but weren’t included in the story.
But top lawmakers in Biden’s own party said they found him surprisingly hard to reach. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, couldn’t even get Biden on the phone before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The president later apologized for the snub.
And as Biden’s poll numbers tanked following his disastrous debate performance, the president eschewed the long, detailed conversations he’d had with his pollster John Anzalone during the 2020 campaign.
Instead, his polling team was told to submit memos to top campaign staff. An aide with a background in polling then sifted through the information and presented it to Biden, making the pollsters wonder if the president was actually getting the data they had prepared.
Those suspicions were apparently well founded, as Biden continued to describe the race as a “tossup” even after polls showed Trump leading him nationally. Bates said Biden stayed abreast of polling data, but he didn’t specify where the information came from.
Eventually, of course, Democratic lawmakers forced Biden to see the light. The president suspended his re-election bid, and Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris following an abbreviated campaign. Leaving Democrats to wonder how they missed their original candidate’s now-obvious liabilities.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Biden for comment but had not heard back at the time of publication.