One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.
For instance, we learned that President Joe Biden hadn’t held a full Cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his Cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.
We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.
These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for reelection.
Still the president
For a few weeks, the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for reelection and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.
The potential scale of that scandal has diminished now that the country is no longer being asked to entrust the Oval Office to Biden for another four years. And concerns about the capacities of Trump, the aging candidate actually running for the White House, are naturally going to claim more attention now that they’re contrasted with a younger rival.
But Biden is still the president — albeit with a “scaled-down schedule” for his last six months. The people who readily signed up for another four years of a 10-to-4 presidency are still running the government around him. And since things keep happening in the world — for instance, this past week, the nation that we’ve been arming for a defensive war decided to invade Russia — it seems like America could stand to learn a bit more about how the White House has been working recently, and what a perceptive observer (say, someone like George Clooney) might notice if he were to observe Biden consistently over a few days or just a full 24 hours.
Instead, we’re getting the fulfillment of the bargain that was implicitly offered to Biden by his fellow Democrats — that by bowing out he would trade the shadow of scandal for the halo of self-sacrifice and coast through the final days as his party’s Cincinnatus, nobly returning to the plow (or the Delaware beach, as may be).
And since that bargain is so far working out so well for his anointed successor, who is surrounded by positive coverage and leading in some polls, the incentive structure for anyone who wants to see Trump defeated seems to favor not talking anymore about the cover-up of the president’s deterioration.
A risky gamble
Certainly, it’s better for Kamala Harris not to be asked questions (assuming that she ever deigns to be interviewed) about whether she participated in that cover-up or was taken in by it. Indeed, it’s better for Harris not to have her boss in the political conversation at all, the better to separate her own identity from his presidency’s unpopularity.
But also we don’t know if it will be possible to keep Biden’s struggles safely in the background, if all the events that require him to play a presidential part will be small successes like the recent hostage swap, where his aides can just swear to his intense behind-the-scenes involvement.
And if for now the act of raising further questions about his fitness is understood to be effectively pro-Trump, that was also how those questions were understood six months ago — and yet here we are and the Democrats should be grateful they were asked.
It’s possible, depending on Biden’s true capacities, that by rights he should have resigned and Harris should be president already — which probably would have put her in a better position to win the election even than her current honeymoon does. It’s also possible that there will come a crisis in the next few months that will make the Democrats wish that he’d resigned, rather than staying and then seeming overmatched.
For now their fervent hope is that we can declare the Joe Biden story all but over and move on. But the reality is that events, not hopes, decide when a presidency is finished.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.