At an anti-hunger convention in September 2022, President Joe Biden surveyed the crowd and shouted, “Jackie, are you here?Where’s Jackie? There is no answer. ” I think she. . . She’ll be here. “
Jackie Walorski, one of the conference organizers, had died in a car crash the previous month. After her death the White House sent condolences in Biden’s name, saying how he “appreciated her partnership” in setting up the conference.
Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, explained Biden’s request for Jackie by saying she was “a priority” for the president at the conference. She repeated the reaction “in mind” more than a dozen times when questioned by reporters. It is an absurd reaction. If Walorski had been “a priority” for Biden, his death would have been as well.
The Daily Beast contacted Jean-Pierre, but she declined to comment on the issues raised in this article.
Fast forward 18 months. Was President Biden’s disastrous performance on June 27 in the CNN/Trump debate a “bad episode” as he claimed, or the culmination of a systematic White House cover-up that concealed symptoms of Biden’s replacement over a period of two to three years?
Haven’t officials, legislators, and the media been curious enough?To what extent did the media and the White House work together to prevent the public from understanding that Biden’s gaffes were getting worse, signaling something more serious, for fear that would allow his Republican opponent to blame him?DO?
Speaking anonymously this week, a member of a conservative primary magazine didn’t know where the blame lay (he recently joined the magazine and didn’t wish to speak publicly). “It was the worst-kept secret in Washington. whitewash. I don’t blame the White House because it was doing everything it could to protect the president. However, the media told a story that was demonstrably false in their own eyes. For years, the electorate had been telling pollsters that Biden was too old. “
Joe Biden listens to Donald Trump speak at their debate in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, on June 27, 2024.
David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, told The Daily Beast that the White House’s role is “complex and more nuanced. ” The White House probably overprotected Biden, but is it a “conspiracy”? No, I think it’s anything that happened unintentionally. They wrapped it in bubble wrap. He was featured in far fewer interviews and press meetings than any president since Ronald Reagan.
Biden’s team facilitated a series of less formal exchanges with reporters (as he crossed South Lawn to the Marine Force 1 helicopter, for example).
These so-called “packs” were more numerous, according to White House sources, than for Obama, George W. But Biden also conducted fewer formal interviews than his six predecessors, Axios reports.
Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News’ senior White House correspondent, elaborated on where and who is to blame. “It has a lot to do with some of the key architects of this strategy. Since then, Anita Dunn (former Biden senior adviser) left the White House. In the days and weeks since the president dropped out of the race, it has been noted that he has more interaction with the media. I think that is what we were missing for a long time when Anita Dunn took over his role.
Heinrich says the strategy ultimately turned out to be a waste. “Despite everything, it turned out well. He said he had a bad night (in the debate), but because of his strategy, the challenge was that we did it. I don’t see him spending many elegant evenings.
Dunn was the first Biden confidant to leave the White House after Harris took on the role of nominee. Andrew Bates, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, told The Daily Beast: “Anita is an advocate for broad media involvement, from extensive meetings to the media. »
The message “Where’s Jackie?” non-isolated episode. In two separate press meetings in February of this year, President Biden twice referred to deceased European leaders (François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl) while telling anecdotes about two (living) European leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron and the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The Guardian’s headline, not ideal for a president who cannot assert his intellectual well-being in an election year, read: “Biden confuses living EU leader with dead one, for the second time in a week. ” »
Jean-Pierre presented a kind of defense. ” As for the names and what I meant. . . a lot of people, elected officials. . . they tend, they can, sometimes they can understand it. “
Mitterrand died in 1996. Kohl died in 2007.
In April, at an industrial union convention in D. C. , Biden inadvertently incorporated a teleprompter instruction into his speech: “Imagine what we can do next. Four more years. Pause. ” Within minutes, clips like those flooded social media and helped build a narrative that hit the polls: Biden is wasting it.
Were those episodes too gently dismissed as the most recent of a declared “gaffe machine”?After the debate, a Washington DC correspondent admitted to media commentator Brain Stelter on Vox that the press would have possibly overlooked the importance of so-called isolated cases. : “Have we missed opportunities to connect safe dots? I think that’s an intelligent question.
Biden and his age are not a new concern. Since 2022, the electorate, in significant numbers, has told voters that Biden is too old to run for president again. In 2023, an ABC/Washington Post poll revealed that 74% of the electorate thought they were too old. This was no exception; Virtually each and every ballot tells the same story. Earlier this year, a vote found that 86% of Americans thought Biden was too old.
In addition to protecting the president for two years, the White House’s retaliatory policy was fiercely opposed to sleuths and media outlets covering the issue.
Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, told Stelter: “They hate us for those stories. The management’s resistance is quite strong and their resentment towards media politics is quite deep, to the point that they have complained to our editors.
Alex Thompson, Axios national reporter, told CNN: “I’ve been covering the Biden White House for three and a half years. The reaction every time this factor has been mentioned has been to divert attention, highlight, not tell the truth, not only to journalists, not only to other Democrats, but even to themselves about the president’s limits at his age. .
Heinrich told the Daily Beast: “We were all ridiculed every time you dared to ask about age. This perpetuated the concept within the press that asking Biden’s age is not a valid topic.
Throughout our reporting, a number of questions have been raised about how the White House has shielded the president from additional press and public scrutiny, as well as how White House press operations reacted to the media politics of the president’s time. Some of those questions involved Jean-Pierre and Andrew Bates.
Joe Biden and Jill Biden attend the first day of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, United States on August 19, 2024.
In a series of communications with the White House, they have balked at many of the express questions asked. Instead, Bates told The Daily Beast: “President Biden has given more than 50 interviews this year alone; he recently held an internal meeting. ” hour-long press conference, he held more than 580 meetings with the sitting White House press and traveled across the country speaking directly to the American people.
Bates continued, “Joe Biden said it was only fair for reporters to ask him about his age. »
The delight of journalists is very different.
Another reaction that pleased the White House was to claim that many of Biden’s clips on social media were heavily edited and distorted.
One prominent incident is “the wind-up clip. ” On June 13 of this year, Biden was waiting with G7 leaders in Italy for a photo op of the organization. In one clip, it turns out that he distances himself aimlessly from the other leaders.
In another angle and montage he is shown turning to have a verbal exchange with a paratrooper organization that had just landed. But the full clip, never seen in the past, also shows Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni inviting Biden to sign up for the organization. None of the clips reflect his personality well, although the first one is deeply misleading.
At a White House press conference ten days before the presidential debate, Jean-Pierre spoke of what he called “cheap fakes,” in reaction to the “snaking clip,” suggesting that the term was first coined through the media. He called it the ‘cheap fakes’ video. And that is precisely what they are. They are made in bad faith.
Some of what he gave the impression on social media was posted through actors of bad religion and harshly edited or distorted. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News have investigated this developing phenomenon. Politifact, in its report, said, “Not each and every video of Biden going through an awkward moment or making a mistake is reasonable fake. But increasingly, photographs of the president are being manipulated to make false and misleading claims. »
Fox News’ Heinrich told the Daily Beast: “There were misleading photographs of him on social media. But they used that to claim that everything you saw was fake. They wanted to be able to suggest that anything you saw that might be unflattering might not be real.
Concern about Biden’s age arose years before he began showing up in polls around 2021. In 2019, Jack Shafer, a well-respected former Politico media critic, wrote an article titled “Is Biden Too Old? In He states: “Some It is taboo to ask whether a candidate is too old to serve as president. Not the press.
Shafer told The Daily Beast, “When I wrote my article in 2019, I pointed to all the articles in the mainstream media that asked the question: Is she too old?Are you mentally up to the task? I came to the conclusion that everyone asked the question: he still didn’t answer.
Many more articles followed in leading media outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and other outlets over the next few years. Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog, said that in a study of six major media outlets between January and June 2024, “we discovered 144 articles focused on the age or intellectual acuity of Biden and Trump, or both, in the period studied”.
Many of the stories about Biden were deep, curious and well-informed, so why did they fail to capture the president’s striking vision—hesitant, empty, incoherent, lost—of how the country viewed the debate?
The articles that were published were not part of a relentless campaign, as some media could cover, for example, the weather, restrictions on voting rights or threats to democracy. Like the aging process itself, they fluctuate, triggered by existing events. .
The release of the report through special advisor Robert K. Hur in February of this year caused such a wave. Hur declined to register a complaint about Biden’s handling of classified documents, in part because of the way the president would provide them to jurors.
Hur wrote damningly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would probably present himself to a jury, as he did in our interview with him, as an old, sympathetic, well-intentioned guy with a bad memory. “
The special suggestion continued: “He remembered, even after several years, the death of his son Beau (he died at the age of 46 in 2015).
Biden angrily defended himself at a specially convened news conference and trashed the special suggestion, saying, “How the hell dare Hur claim he forgot the year of his son’s death?In the same press, Biden referred to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico. “Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is the president of Egypt.
The Washington Post wrote a commentary from the leader, stating, “Voters’ views of Mr. SBiden are not only widespread, but also perfectly legitimate. “A week later, influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recorded a podcast. in which he said Biden would resign as the Democratic candidate. Klein predicted the furor that would ensue: “I know a lot of Democrats are going to be mad at me for this show. “
In a sign that many Democrats were blind or despised the age question, Klein said, “To say that other people are concerned about Biden’s age because the media helps them keep telling them to care about Biden’s age?If you’re convinced of this, I almost don’t know what to tell you.
Social networks have lit up thanks to Klein’s complaint. Biden’s age is once again a hot topic.
Joe Biden delivers his third State of the Union address at the United States Capitol in Washington, D. C. , on March 7, 2024.
The President later delivered a State of the Union address that went down well in many quarters. Commentators wrote approvingly of the feisty, tough performance. Even Republicans seemed impressed. Trump told a radio host that Biden “was very excited at first. “
Andrew Prokop, senior political editor at Vox, said the speech deserves to put an end to questions about Biden’s age: “The media’s verdict is in: President Joe Biden has put an end to concerns about his age. This verdict shows how stupid Biden’s age statement is in recent weeks. “
The question of Biden’s age faded again, until the Wall Street Journal published a month-long investigation in early June, just weeks before the CNN/Trump debate, titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Is Showing slip symptoms.
The Journal spoke to more than 40 people, and their readings on Biden’s intellectual acuity echoed what pollsters have learned since 2022. “However, some of those who worked with him, adding Democrats and others who knew him when he was vice president. Array described a president who is now slower, someone who has good and bad moments. “
The White House’s reaction was swift and sustained. After the article appeared, the Journal reported that “Andrew Bates, the White House spokesman, used his official X account to attack the report, publishing it about 80 times and privately contacting journalists from other media outlets to criticize it. “(One of the newspaper’s reporters told the BBC that their investigation was prompted by Hur’s report and the finding that the special counsel had spent more time with the president than any journalist in recent times. )
And it’s not just the White House. Many media outlets mocked the Journal’s reporting, claiming that it was largely supported by Republican sources. This is the case in part because few Democratic officials were willing to speak on the record, if at all.
A veteran Washington political reporter, who now writes for a center-right news site, spoke anonymously to The Daily Beast: “That the challenge in Washington . . . Sound the alarm unofficially.
A more direct complaint of the article, highlighted through Nancy Pelosi, is that the article overlooked Democrats who reported publicly on specific meetings and instead gave preference to Republicans who spoke anonymously.
In an article on X, he said, “Many of us have spent time with @WSJ to officially share our firsthand reports with @POTUS, where we see their wisdom, experience, strength, and strategic thinking,” Pelosi wrote. Instead, the Journal ignored the Democrats’ testimony, focusing on the Republican attacks and a best-selling article. “
Washington Post political columnist Jennifer Rubin went further: “Perhaps the overwhelmingly negative reaction of other sleuths to what is necessarily the promotion of a right-wing meme will diminish such irresponsible reporting as the election year progresses. “
That’s not how it happened. And after the debate, the WSJ article was considered remarkably prescient.
The White House has also deployed tactics (in addition to shielding Biden and alleging “cheap fakes”) to stifle investigations into Biden’s age. They wondered why news sleuths were interested in this issue, when they could simply cover up the risk that former President Trump posed to democracy.
At the unofficial media meeting at Biden’s headquarters in Delaware in April, when Biden’s team was in the mood for an early debate, reporters asked them about Biden’s age factor.
A veteran Washington-based journalist told The Daily Beast that the reaction was icy. The officials got angry. ” The suggestion was that the media should not obsess over one era while the other is a dictator. »
Aside from Biden’s performance, the most remarkable aspect of the debate is that it took place in June, a traditionally early date for a presidential debate.
Speaking anonymously, a senior Washington-based political journalist said that at the unofficial special media town hall at Biden’s Delaware headquarters in April of this year, Biden’s team revealed that they were upset that Trump “monopolizes so much attention. ” with his legal affairs.
Biden’s team told reporters and editors they were looking for a quick debate to refocus the verbal exchange on Trump’s risks. “There is a feeling that it is necessary to restructure the electorate. Hence his appetite for early debate. ”
Be careful what you look for.
President Joe Biden listens as Republican presidential candidate and former U. S. President Donald Trump speaks at their debate in Atlanta, Georgia, U. S. , June 27, 2024.
From the moment Biden stiffly walked onto the stage, the optics were horrible. Her voice was very thin and on the split screen she looked at Trump with a blank expression. As one critic noted, even though the volume went down, Biden performed terribly.
At his worst – a competitive box – he ended his reaction on immigration with: “And I’m going to keep going until we get a blanket ban on immigration. “the overall initiative regarding what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.
When asked for an answer, Trump paused before summing up what many in the audience were actually thinking: “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knew what he said either.
Biden would take office mentioning a cold trip abroad. Days after the debate, he told donors at a fundraiser in Virginia: “I wasn’t very smart. I made the decision to travel the world several times. . . some time before the debate. And then I almost fell asleep on stage.
The presidential debate took place on June 27. Biden returned from his foreign trips on June 14. He spent a week starting June 20 at Camp David to prepare for the debate.
Anita Dunn, a former Biden adviser, in her first interview since leaving the White House, told Politico that Biden’s team was encouraged and self-assured after preparing for the debate. “We felt good, that I was quite well prepared. He also had terrible bleeding that worsened throughout the week. I think there is no doubt that this had an influence.
Dunn told Politico that he watched the debate while receiving real-time feedback from an organization of undecided voters: “Voters didn’t like Biden’s functionality in the first part. He didn’t score well at all. They liked the second part. ” part of the debate. debate.
Dunn said polls immediately after the debate did not recommend a challenge for Biden. The negativity that enveloped his crusade in the days that followed only provoked, he said, through the reaction of the press: “We saw an environment in the press that was consistently negative. “
Will Saletan of the Bulwark responded to Dunn’s interview: “It’s a gruesome window into the deliberate blindness that kept him in the race long after he deserved to have left him. “
Biden’s debate function provoked an avalanche of recriminations. Some say the White House and giant sections of the media engaged in a blatant political cover-up.
Among the numerous postmortems: Megan McArdle in the Washington Post, “How the Media Sleepwalked Through the Biden Debate Crisis,” Philip Klein in the conservative magazine National Review (“The Coverup of Biden’s Intellectual Decline Isn’t Just a political problem “). Problem: it’s a scandal”), and an observation through the Wall Street Journal editorial office accused those close to the president of hiding his intellectual decadence: “Democrats can’t solve Biden’s problem. “
A few days later, several Washington-based journalists admitted, all anonymously, to CNN that they had lacked the interest and vigor to pursue the case. One of them said: “Some journalists have said that there has been a transparent replacement in recent years and that the press has reported more aggressively. “
But not everyone detected a “distinctive change. ” And the authors of major American publications that covered the president in intelligent religion wrote at length about how they observed a guy who, at times, doubted and confused, but who also had a tenacious grasp of political issues and reality.
When Biden biographer Evan Osnos met with the president for a lengthy article in The New Yorker in January, he wrote, “His voice is thin and coagulated, and his mannerisms slowed down, but, in our conversation, his brain didn’t change. He never ruined a call or a date.
Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, recalls a press vacation a few months ago, shortly before the debate. “I wrote with Biden’s press group. It was a weekend flight from one position to another aboard Air Force One, with 4 crusades. He stops by and participated in the keynote lecture at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. I guess for an 81-year-old man, he was doing pretty well despite a busy schedule for all of us.
But others saw Biden hour after hour, day after day. And those people, in a better position to reveal why Biden’s debate was so impactful, are still talking. By the end of the president’s reign as the Democratic nominee, his entourage had dwindled to longtime advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, his spouse Jill, and top advisers Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini.
These are the other people who, according to the New York Times, were with Biden the day before he resigned. Ricchetti and Donilon presented the most recent polls, “Mr. Biden was falling behind, nationally and in key battleground states. There was still a path to victory, they pleaded with him, but the fight would be ugly. “Soon after, and after speaking with Jill, Bernal and Tomasini, he, according to the Times, “directed Marray Donilon and M. Ricchetti. checkered in a statement, while the others took a break for dinner with pizza.
It is almost very unlikely to believe that Biden’s closest advisers would threaten Biden’s dignity and legacy by agreeing to a debate if they had detected a decline in the president’s intellectual acuity in the previous months. But, in addition, it is almost very unlikely to think that his performance in the debate came out of nowhere.
For now, the full story of Biden’s intellectual acumen over the past few years has not been told, nor what other people knew or when. Possibly that is about to change. The veteran Washington D. C. journalist said, “The White House’s operations were notoriously fair and leak-free. That changed after the debate, when the family turned on the team for over-grooming Biden. They began blaming the staff, and for the first time in this leak-free White House, the staff turned around and started talking.
Once the White House is dissolved, the recriminations will continue. Biden described the debate as a “bad night. ” But it is a crisis that has been months, if not years, in the making.
For years, the Democratic Party and the White House have fought what they see as an existential risk to democracy from Donald Trump, but failed in a much closer war.
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