President Joe Biden begins a new phase of his presidency this week.
Now free from the constraints of a reelection campaign, he is in the early stages of a strategy that will take him to places at home and abroad over the next five months that he likely would have ignored as a 2024 candidate. The goal, however, is to secure the White House, his legacy and some of his most important achievements.
On Thursday, Biden will travel to a small town in a southwestern Wisconsin county that voted reliably Democratic for two decades until former President Donald Trump won it twice. Biden will make more trips like this, to Republican-leaning areas — and eventually even Republican-leaning states — to show that his agenda has benefited those who voted against him, multiple Biden advisers said.
Aides are also redirecting the time Biden had set aside for domestic politics, allowing him to focus instead on foreign policy. There are plans for a farewell international tour of sorts, including a long-promised trip to Africa in October.
“The schedule will be robust and he plans to make everything happen on the field,” said Ben LaBolt, White House communications director.
Biden enters the twilight of his presidency with few recent precedents to guide him. Re-elected presidents begin their second terms knowing they have years to shape their legacy. Recent one-term presidents, by contrast, fought until their final weeks to stay in office.
Still, a senior Biden adviser noted that the president has been aware of the gravity of history since he first entered the Oval Office, weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and amid the public health and economic crises.
“It’s always been there because the stakes were so high,” the consultant said.
Still, the president’s advisers said a new approach was needed after Biden made the consequential decision in late July to end his candidacy for a second term and endorse Vice President Kamala. Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket. One of the first directives Biden gave after withdrawing was to his chief of staff, Jeff Zients, saying he wanted his final 180 days in the Oval Office to be as significant as any comparable period before him in his term.
Broadly speaking, that meant implementing the pillars of his legislative record — infrastructure investments, boosting manufacturing, climate change initiatives and expanded veterans care — while also looking at where the president could lay the groundwork for unrealized or even new policy proposals that would jump-start a potential Harris administration.
Zients then worked with other top advisers to craft a specific action plan, the first outlines of which were presented to Biden when he embarked on a two-week bicoastal vacation following his farewell speech at the Democratic National Committee on Aug. 19, Biden aides said.
Advisers said it focuses on four goals: finding new ways to increase investment in U.S. infrastructure; lowering costs for Americans; protecting freedoms that the president says are under attack; and strengthening U.S. alliances to meet global challenges.
Both goals are aimed at polishing Biden’s legacy, but the president’s advisers said they also want to build a case against Trump, hoping it will benefit Harris’ campaign.
“Good governance is a way of showing contrasts,” said one official.
Biden’s team is in regular contact with Harris’ campaign — one, advisers note, they largely built — to ensure the president’s actions are helpful, Biden’s aides said. The goal, they said, is for Biden to act “surgically” and campaign where it’s “strategically impactful” for him to go, as one of them put it.
Aides say Biden is targeting constituencies he likes, such as older voters and working-class communities.
The Biden official also argued that the president’s record remains popular among Democrats. “It’s not like 2008,” the official noted, when then-President George W. Bush was about to leave office with approval ratings as low as 20% and an economy in free fall.
Much of Biden’s domestic travel will take place under the guise of official government business, such as the stops he plans to make in Wisconsin and Michigan on Thursday and Friday.
Biden is also expected to travel extensively abroad, including in October after the annual gathering of world leaders in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, according to two senior administration officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the plans.
Possible countries he could visit in October, as the presidential campaign ramps up, include Germany and at least one stop in sub-Saharan Africa, the officials said.
None of the ideas under discussion have been finalized on the president’s agenda, one of the senior administration officials said, adding: “The team is gathering options.”
Biden plans to travel to Brazil for the Group of 20 summit and to Peru for a meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders, officials said. Biden wants to hold high-profile meetings with key world leaders, including the U.N. General Assembly later this month and a possible meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November on the sidelines of the G20, the officials said.
Since dropping out of the 2024 race, Biden has had far more time to devote to foreign policy than his senior advisers had planned when they expected him to campaign nonstop for reelection, the officials said.
According to Sean Savett, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, his foreign policy has been very busy in recent months.
Now he’s able to chat longer on the phone with world leaders, extending conversations that previously would have been limited by a busy schedule. In recent conversations, the president has told his counterparts he looks forward to seeing them again before he leaves office and has even joked about how much more free time he has, according to a Biden aide.
While Biden’s goals for his final months in office are set, specific plans could change after September, aides said, noting that the presidency is inherently fraught with unforeseen events.
His role in the campaign will not be as large as the role that outgoing President Barack Obama played for then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton eight years ago. That campaign featured regular campaign events in key states, including a large joint closing rally in Philadelphia.
But Biden aides pointed out that the president’s rally in Pittsburgh on Monday is indicative of what they believe he can do for Harris, highlighting her character and her commitment to supporting the working class and middle class he has long considered his political base.
“We can help strengthen the argument, strengthen the argument for her in the same way that we did as vice president against President Obama, and the same way that Vice President Harris helped us win in 2020,” Biden’s senior adviser said.
Biden said at a White House meeting on Tuesday that he would spend the coming weeks “talking to Americans across the country about the progress we’re seeing in their communities.” He also indicated he wants to make the most of his final months there.
“I won’t be in the White House much longer, but you should definitely come by and see me,” Biden told the four local officials who attended the event virtually on Tuesday.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
