For three and a half years, Joe Biden has been wrapped in a metaphorical ball of lint by an anxious White House staff eager to protect him from the worst.
Worried about signs of aging and increasing verbal gaffes, they have kept press conferences and media interviews to a minimum.
Meetings with MPs, which were frequent enough in his first year in office – despite coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic – dropped by two-thirds by his third year.
Public appearances are tightly restricted and controlled, and the president speaks primarily through automated prompts.
Impromptu exchanges with reporters were deemed too risky, leading the 81-year-old Biden to hold fewer presidential news conferences than any U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. Even traditional pre-Super Bowl television interviews, an opportunity to reach the largest audience ever for a political broadcast, have been shunned over the past two years.
Now that approach has been revealed, with Biden’s poor performance in a televised debate against Donald Trump last week putting his presidential candidacy in dire jeopardy seemingly exposed as a A desperate attempt to limit the damage.
Democrats considering replacing him accuse his handlers of erecting a wall of denial to offset years of murmurs about his age-related decline, only to have the truth emerge in a way that dramatically increased public support for him. Sudden exposure.
“We feel like we were lied to,” one Democratic senator who spoke on condition of anonymity told Punchbowl. “They’ve been protecting him from this type of environment for months, even at this point when it became undeniable. After that, they still lied to us.”
The complaint reflects a backlash against the White House, which has sought to dismiss the despicable debate performance as an unrepresentative event.
The narrative contrasts with a wave of new reports describing an aging president whose verbal and behavioral gaffes have become more frequent in recent months.
Carl Bernstein is one of Washington’s best-known journalists, best known for his involvement in the Watergate scandal 50 years ago. Not typical, but increasingly representative.
“These people, some of them are very close to President Biden, they love him,” he said. “They firmly believe that what we saw the other night… was not a one-off, that there have been 15 to 20 times in the past year and a half that the president has been in situations as horrific as his. It shows what we saw with our own eyes. “
This view is supported by a series of recent incidents in which the president either said the wrong thing or appeared confused, which the New York Times reported this week has been happening with increasing frequency lately.
Last month, at a lavish White House event celebrating the granting of citizenship to 500,000 undocumented immigrants who married Americans, Biden seemed to momentarily forget that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas name. “I’m not sure I’m going to introduce you all the way,” the president stammered awkwardly, then seemed to recover and remember Mayorka’s name.
In May, at a Jewish-American Heritage Month celebration in the Rose Garden, the president tried to introduce an American citizen currently held hostage in Gaza as a guest of the event, but then corrected himself again.
At two separate fundraisers in February, he described the first meeting with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the 2021 G7 summit and the other at the same gathering with former French President François François-France. Francois Mitterrand in conversation. Both leaders had left office and died in the years leading up to the summit.
At last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, European observers were said to be “shocked” by Biden’s status, according to The New York Times The report quoted an unnamed official as saying that the president seemed “not normal.”
One of Biden’s few recent spontaneous interactions with reporters came after special counsel Robert Hur called him a “well-intentioned man with a bad memory” in his report on Biden’s improper withholding of classified documents. After the old man.
The president tried to defend himself during a White House press conference, but reinforced that description by referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the “President of Mexico.”
Now he will be interviewed by the ABC’s George Stephanopoulos tomorrow in an attempt to erase the image of over-shielding quarantine, a gesture to the media that his party’s Critics say action should have been taken immediately after the debate fiasco.
Biden and his team hope the event will effectively salvage his candidacy by reversing the perception that the president is too fragile to face the outside world without protection.
But the surprising role Biden’s son Hunter has played in recent days could complicate the offensive. He has been attending White House meetings since last week.
His appearance was met with unpopularity by some senior White House staff, according to NBC, which reported the story. “What the hell happened?” one person reportedly said.
