For three and a half years, Joe Biden was wrapped in a metaphorical cotton ball by a concerned White House staff, trying to protect him from the worst within himself.
Concerned about the signs of aging and the increasing tendency to make verbal blunders, they keep press conferences and media interviews to a minimum.
Meetings with members of Congress, which he had been holding regularly in his first year — despite coinciding with part of the Covid-19 pandemic — had been cut by two-thirds by his third year.
Public appearances were strictly rationed and controlled, with the president speaking mainly through an autocue.
Unscripted exchanges with reporters were seen as too dangerous, leading the 81-year-old Biden to hold fewer presidential news conferences than any U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. Even the traditional pre-Super Bowl television interview—a chance to reach the largest audience ever likely to tune in to a political broadcast—has been skirted around in the past two years.
Now the approach has gone spectacularly off the rails. It looks as if last week’s poor performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump was a desperate attempt at damage control. As a result, Biden’s presidential candidacy has been put in grave jeopardy.
Democrats considering his replacement accuse his advisers of building a wall of denial to quell years of rumors about his age-related decline, only to let the truth emerge, significantly increasing the chances of a second Trump presidency.
“We just feel like we’ve been lied to,” an anonymous Democratic senator told the website Punchbowl. “They’ve shielded him from this kind of situation for months and even after it became undeniable, they’re still lying to us.”
The complaint reflected deep dissatisfaction with the White House’s efforts to portray the disgraceful debate spectacle as an unrepresentative incident.
That narrative, however, has been sharply contradicted by a series of new reports describing an aging president whose verbal and behavioral missteps have become increasingly frequent in recent months.
Carl Bernstein — one of Washington’s most revered journalists for his work covering the Watergate scandal 50 years ago — told CNN this week that multiple well-placed sources had told him Biden’s performance during the debate was not atypical, but increasingly representative.
“These are people, many of whom are very close to President Biden, who love him,” he said. “They are adamant that what we saw the other night … is not a one-time occurrence, that there have been 15 to 20 occasions in the last year and a half where the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we saw.”
This view is supported by a series of recent incidents in which the president appeared to have slipped up or been confused. According to the New York Times, these incidents have become increasingly frequent lately.
Last month, Biden appeared to forget the name of his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, during a gala event at the White House celebrating the granting of citizenship rights to 500,000 undocumented immigrants married to Americans. “I’m not sure I’m going to fully introduce you,” the president stammered awkwardly, before appearing to recover and remember Mayorkas’ name.
In May, during a celebration of Jewish-American Heritage in the Rose Garden, the president attempted to introduce an American citizen who was being held hostage in Gaza as a guest at the event, before correcting himself again.
At two separate fundraisers in February, he described, first, meeting former German Chancellor Helmuth Kohl at the 2021 G7 summit, and the other time speaking to Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, at the same meeting. Both leaders left office and died years before the summit.
At last month’s G7 meeting in Italy, European observers were reportedly “shocked” by Biden’s condition, according to the New York Times report, which quoted an anonymous official as saying the president appeared “out of it.”
One of the few recent occasions when Biden spontaneously interacted with reporters was after special counsel Robert Hur called him a “well-meaning older man with a bad memory” in his report on Biden’s wrongful withholding of classified documents.
The president attempted to defend himself at a White House press conference, but instead reinforced the narrative by referring to Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the Egyptian president, as “the president of Mexico.”
Now he will try to dispel the image of overprotective isolation by giving an interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos tomorrow. Critics from his own party say this interview should have been given immediately after the media debate fiasco.
Biden and his team hope the event will effectively dispel the image of a confused president who is too vulnerable to face the outside world unprotected, and thus save his candidacy.
But the offensive may have been further complicated by the surprising role played in recent days by Biden’s son Hunter. He was convicted last month on three felony weapons charges and, against all precedent, began attending White House meetings a week ago.
His appearance has drawn a less-than-welcome reaction from some senior White House staff, according to NBC, which broke the story. “What the hell is going on?” one reportedly said.
