When Joe Biden became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal during his first US presidential campaign in 1987, his adviser and friend Ted Kaufman was blunt: “There’s only one way to stop the sharks, and that’s to back off,” he said.
When Biden considered running for the White House again in 2015, it was up to another confidant, Mike Donilon, to make the final call. “I saw him look at me and he gestured, ‘What’s wrong, Mike?'” Biden later wrote in his memoir. “‘I don’t think you should do this,’ he said.”
Related: Anxious donors plan next steps after Biden debate disaster
On both occasions, Biden followed the advice. Now, in 2024, he is president, but he is again facing questions about his future after a car-crash debate performance against Donald Trump last week. The debacle has also cast a critical light on the advice given by his most trusted advisers.
It was Biden’s campaign that announced the early debate, set rules that seemed to play into his opponent’s hands and rehearsed him for the televised confrontation. Members of Biden’s family reportedly criticized his top advisers at Camp David over the weekend and urged him to make changes.
Some donors have also called for a shakeup of the team, which includes Donilon, a close adviser since the 1980s; Ron Klain, Biden’s first White House chief of staff; Ted Kaufman, who has been at his side for more than half a century; Anita Dunn, a former White House counsel and adviser, and her husband, Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney who played Trump during the Camp David training sessions.
The debate strategy was approved by campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon, who helped Biden in 2020 and was appointed in January to boost his re-election campaign. Dunn supported the strategy.
“@JoeBiden advisors failed him,” John Morgan, a top Democratic Party donor, posted on the social media platform X. “Size was a disaster for him and a win for Trump. He practiced too much and was exhausted… who wouldn’t be.”
Morgan added: “Biden has been fooled for too long by the worth of Anita Dunn and her husband. They must… go TODAY. The scam is disgusting. It was political malpractice.”
Biden’s biggest career decisions have always been based on family. His wife, Jill Biden, and son Hunter Biden are adamant that he stay in the race for the White House, and no one carries more weight. His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, who managed many of his campaigns, has been one of his staunchest defenders.
Donilon, 65, Klain, 62, and Kaufman, 85, are the ultimate Biden insiders and will now be thinking about how to get the ship back on course. Biden said he would talk to Donilon several times a day, and Klain most days. Donilon was the brains behind the 2020 election strategy, focused on defending democracy. Both he and Klain, who took time off from his job as chief legal officer, went to Camp David to prepare for the debate (Klain’s ninth overall).
Biden regularly meets with Kaufman for lunch when he returns to Delaware for the weekend. When Biden’s family asked him to run for president in 2008, Kaufman was the only non-Biden in the room, the New York Times reported. Valerie Biden Owens wrote in her memoir, “Joe has long said that Ted Kaufman is the wisest man he has ever known. Ted is his true north.”
‘The campaign will now have to operate at a higher level’
Biden’s campaign had wanted an unusually early debate, in June, to warn voters of the threat Trump posed. They got their way in Atlanta, with a mute button, no studio audience and no Robert F. Kennedy. Still, Biden, 81, seemed out of sorts, stumbling over words, losing his train of thought and failing to stem the tide of Trump’s lies.
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I’ve spoken to a number of people who were involved in previous debate sessions who believe the president was too well prepared, that his head was filled with too many facts and too few themes, and that it would have been better to go with his instincts rather than come up with poll-tested, focus-group-based alternatives to what he would have said spontaneously.”
The Democratic Party has been convulsed by a debate over whether Biden should withdraw in favor of a younger candidate, a process that carries enormous risks in its own right. But the Biden family — including Hunter — and his senior advisers have rallied behind the president, urging him to fight on.
Galston added: “I would have preferred a deeper and more nuanced reflection than appears to be the case and I hope against hope that this is not the final word on this subject, but it may well be.”
The day after the debate, Biden returned with a powerful speech in North Carolina and a promise to keep going. In an email to supporters on Saturday, O’Malley Dillon said internal polling and focus groups showed no change in the opinions of voters in swing states after the debate.
She warned that “overblown media stories” could lead to “temporary drops in the polls,” but said she was confident Biden would win in November. The campaign is eager to end the conversation and move on. But some Democrats are still demanding answers.
Simon Rosenberg, a party strategist, wrote on his Hopium Chronicles website: “Yes, we need to hear from Joe Biden and the campaign in the coming days about why Thursday night went so wrong and what can be done to ensure such terrible events do not happen again. They need some time to talk internally and come together around a new strategy.”
In a telephone interview, Rosenberg added: “The campaign is going to have to operate at a higher level now, because I think our job has become a little bit more difficult and we’re going to have to fight a lot harder than we were. I think people understand that. The campaign is going to have to do more now and take more responsibility than before. But we’re ready for it..”
Biden’s campaign has been condemned as narrow-minded and defensive, with calls to work with — not against — allies who have legitimate concerns about what they saw last Thursday.
Patrick Gaspard, president of the think tank Center for American Progress, said: “They don’t have to do it alone now. They don’t have to sit in a bunker. They have to work with humility and vulnerability with all the partners here who love this president, who care deeply about the crisis of democracy that we’re in and who are committed to all doing our part.”
He added: “That team now has the responsibility to expand the circle of support, the circle of trust and the circle of storytelling.”
Biden’s campaign said in an email that it was not considering any personnel changes. The president’s loyalty to his inner circle means heads are unlikely to roll; he resisted calls to fire national security adviser Jake Sullivan after the failed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. But there is pressure to change course.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said the campaign needs to promote the idea that what happened in that debate was a fluke. “We need to see that the norm is a robust, powerful, energetic, capable, competent candidate. The only way to do that is to show him everywhere. They’ve resisted things like the Super Bowl. They’ve limited his exposure. They’ve kept him in a bit of a bubble, understandably.”
Bardella added: “People believe he can stick to a script if it’s given to him and it’s in front of him. People believe he can operate if there are guardrails around him. The question the American people have is, if those guardrails aren’t there, how is he going to do it? The only time they’ve seen him without those guardrails was during this debate, and it was a disaster.”
