At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
By Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes | Thursday, December 19, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST
During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.
His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.
The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.
The small correction foreshadowed how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.
My good friend William Teach had several stories, before the 2020 election, noting how former Vice President Biden’s aides put him to bed early called an early end to his campaign days.
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
That’s an important paragraph. The badly botched final withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred on August 30, 2021, when Mr Biden had been president for only 222 days, or just 32 weeks. The newspaper just told us that President Biden was known by his staffers to have diminished capacity in his first year in office.
The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier.
The White House kept things secret until the secret couldn’t be kept anymore. But it raises the obvious question: why did President Biden decide to try for a second term? Was he unaware of his own condition? And who among the people with vested interests in him staying in office, including First Lady Edith Wilson Jill Biden, pushed him to run for a second term?
But here’s the money line:
This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.
Think of all of the journalists and journalism students who’ve had dreams of being the next Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated a President while that President was in office, and ferreted out the story that drove Richard Nixon from office, including finding sources within the White House. In this story, reporters Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes also found sources inside the White House . . . but only after the horse was not only out of the barn, but had burst through the field gates and was galloping down the road.
There is, of course, a major difference: the Washington Post reporters, Messrs Woodward and Bernstein, Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, and publisher Katharine Graham didn’t like President Nixon, while the vast majority of today’s credentialed media hate former and future President Donald Trump, and support any and every Democrat, including President Biden, who defeated Mr Trump in 2020 and they hoped could defeat him again in 2024.
Where was what the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer called “the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy” when it came to Joe Biden?
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” was the tagline the Post added in 2017, widely seen as a dig at then new President Trump and his disdain for the credentialed media, but didn’t the Post contribute to, didn’t the newspaper promote the darkness by not doing its journalistic duty? “All the News That’s Fit to Print” proudly proclaims The New York Times, but apparently news about the condition of the President of the United States, a man playing nuclear patty-cake with Vladimir Putin, just wasn’t fit to print.
We had a situation in which either none of today’s aggressive journalists were interested in pursuing the stories of Mr Biden’s decline, or, if any of them did investigate, their editors spiked the stories.
But, we’re not to worry: the credentialed media will be on the case now, and investigate every word, phrase, policy, stumble, and gaffe by incoming President Trump. If he stubs his toe, it will be on the front pages of the Post and the Times, with fresh video on CNN and MSNBC. The media have learned their lesson, or at least they’ve learned it until the next Democrat takes office.