‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate
The senior team’s management of Biden has grown more strictly controlled as his term has gone on.
Over the course of his presidency, Joe Biden’s small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him, limiting his exposure to the media and outside advice — an effort to manage public perceptions of the oldest person to ever hold the office and tightly control his political operation.
But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”
The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.”
The debate, however, was so dismal for Biden that nobody could ignore it. For as furiously as Biden’s advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president’s halting, soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump, 78, shattered the party’s magical thinking on the subject. That the president’s difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon — far away from cameras, questions and more intense public scrutiny.
Even the president’s family, which gathered Sunday at Camp David for a previously scheduled portrait session with photographer Annie Leibovitz and private conversations about where to go from here, was pointing the finger at long-standing members of the senior team: senior adviser Anita Dunn, one of several proponents of the earlier debate, and former chief of staff Ron Klain, who oversaw the week of debate prep at Camp David. But Biden himself told those aides he wasn’t blaming them, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
“The whole planning, preparation was political malpractice,” Democratic megadonor John Morgan said in an interview, laying blame on “the cabal” of the president’s closest aides, including Klain, Dunn and her husband, Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer. “I think he has a misplaced trust in these three people, and I believe he has from the inception.”
It’s not just those aides. Democrats frustrated with Biden’s insular senior team are well acquainted with the longtime aides who continue to have the president’s ear: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, as well as Ted Kaufman and Klain on the outside. “It’s the same people — he has not changed those people for 40 years,” said one Democratic operative and close adviser to several members of Congress, who blamed the entire group for refusing to shift course even as Biden trailed Trump for months in the polls. “All these guys running the campaign from the White House is not working.”
As a Democratic strategist in a battleground state put it: “The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now.” And, the strategist said, “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone.”
This article was based on interviews with more than two dozen people, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive subject. The White House disputed the characterization of Biden as isolated, asserting that he frequently seeks input from policy and political staff and that briefings often include as many as eight to 10 people. They specifically disputed the claim that Biden is protected from dissenting opinions, noting that it’s been the job of a staff secretary in every administration to make sure the president gets all of the information he needs and nothing extraneous. Senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates denied that briefing materials have been curated to avoid upsetting Biden, calling that suggestion “false.”
But now, after Biden’s abysmal performance in the first debate, even some White House staffers are among a growing group of Democratic lawmakers, fundraisers, operatives and activists who have concluded — with sudden clarity — that the cloistered Biden inner sanctum itself is to blame for their current predicament.
By the time Biden’s campaign proposed two debates with Trump, many White House staffers had no idea it was in the works, according to three administration officials. The plan and quiet negotiations with networks had been especially tightly held by the president’s small inner circle, spread between the West Wing and his Wilmington-based campaign headquarters.
“Everyone was told this was for the best,” said a White House staffer. “Now, it’s the worst possible outcome. And we’re all trying to figure out why the people who know him best and make all the decisions didn’t seem to anticipate that this might happen.”
Following the debate, the pervasive view throughout much of the party is of Biden’s inner circle as an impenetrable group of enablers who deluded themselves about his ability to run again even as they’ve assiduously worked to accommodate his limitations and shield them from view.
For months, that mostly worked. Democrats’ strong 2022 showing, Biden’s top aides claimed, offered validation for his reelection bid, helping shut down credible primary challenges and spurring the Democratic National Committee to reshuffle the early state calendar to Biden’s benefit. When aides to the president suggested he was the best and only candidate who could beat Trump, few pushed back.
“The fact is, there wasn’t an open dialogue about whether he should run except for the people who would benefit from him running,” said a Democratic operative close to the campaign. They described the inner circle, Donilon especially, as convinced “that this was going to be about Trump, not about Biden, and at the end of the day, people just wouldn’t vote for Trump. But here we are, we’re sitting in July, and the race is about Biden, and it’s about a trait you can’t fix.”
Two Biden officials disputed that characterization of Donilon’s point of view. One prominent Biden donor in close touch with the White House and campaign was more circumspect: “We’ve all enabled the situation,” they said.
No one has done more to keep the president isolated — and shielded from tough conversations — than his wife, first lady Jill Biden, and sister, Valerie Biden Owens. The president’s determination to spend weekends at home in Wilmington, away from most aides and the formal trappings of the White House, may be the clearest manifestation of Biden’s strong preference for familiarity and privacy.
Most aides who have worked for Biden for any significant length of time share the president’s own resentments about an elite political and media class that has never, in their view, given him his due. And they tend to view Biden’s debate meltdown and the ensuing party-wide freak-out about his candidacy as just another moment of being counted out. Their recent experience — Biden’s 2020 win and the Democrats’ history-defying midterm success in 2022 — has many convinced that he’ll survive this, too.
