Observers of the American presidency warn with increasing frequency that the office of the country’s chief executive has acquired power more befitting a monarchy than a republic with elected officials. But what if the person holding that office is a placeholder for aides who cocoon the president and who really make the decisions? That is, what if all that growing power is wielded by an unelected and relatively faceless circle of advisers? That brings us to the Biden administration which, in just one term, has powerfully reinforced the argument for making the presidency much less important.
“Presidents always have gatekeepers,” Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes wrote last week for The Wall Street Journal. “But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.”
In President Joe Biden’s day-to-day work, they added, several key aides to the elderly official “were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance….They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.”
The New York Times, which has been protective of Biden’s tarnished reputation, conceded in a story by Peter Baker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs that “time is catching up with Mr. Biden. He looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day.” People who traveled with the president noted that he “maintained a light schedule at times and sometimes mumbled, making him hard to understand.”
None of this is especially surprising to the American people at this point. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, which forced him to surrender dreams of a second term, surveys found overwhelming majorities—86 percent in a February 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll—thought he was too old to serve four more years in office. That followed special counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to prosecute Biden for illegally retaining classified materials because he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hellbound and Down 