The media need to pierce what the White House calls ‘the wall’ protecting him.
The media need to pierce what the White House calls ‘the wall’ protecting him.
T he mainstream media erupted in outrage last week after an Oregon parent used a Christmas Eve Santa-tracking call to troll President Biden with the rude and disrespectful “Let’s Go Brandon” phrase.
Ron Brownstein, a senior editor of The Atlantic, warned about the incident on CNN, saying, “I don’t think it’s fundamentally about incivility. It’s about insurrection.”
Others piled on as well, oblivious to the fact that they’d been silent when celebrities frequently attacked Donald Trump in vulgar terms, or when one was even photographed holding up a bloodied mock-up of his chopped-off head.
But almost everyone ignored what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story.” That is, why had President Biden responded to the slur with a cheery “Let’s Go Brandon, I agree” — and without missing a beat? Did he not know the meaning of the slur, even though it has been displayed on signs and shouted out at events that he’s attended ever since it originated at a NASCAR race in October? If he was aware of it, why would he give oxygen to such a coded insult by affirming it?
Certainly First Lady Jill Biden, seated next to her husband, appeared to know exactly what the profane phrase meant — she gave an awkward chuckle and then rolled her eyes.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, certainly gave the impression that her boss knew about it last month. She responded to a question about what Biden thought of the phrase by saying, “I don’t think he spends much time focused on it or thinking about it.” Since then, the White House press office has ignored inquiries about the phrase.
Unscripted moments in the Biden White House are rare indeed. The White House has adopted the same bunker mentality evident in the 2020 “Biden basement” campaign and has kept him out of sight. That’s why moments such as Biden’s “I agree” rejoinder should attract attention.
In the first eleven months of his presidency, Biden has participated in just 16 one-on-one interviews. At this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had participated in 155 and Donald Trump had engaged in 72. As vice president from 2009 to 2017, Biden by contrast was a media hog, often doing all three network morning shows in one day. Has something changed? Increasingly, everyone in Washington is talking about a simple truth: The president is in a slow fade, but almost no one wants to seriously confront it.
Biden gets away with his inaccessibility campaign because the media let him. A few brave souls have raised the issue: Mark Halperin, editor of the insider newsletter WideWorldNews, laments “the failure of the Dominant Media to write about (the Christmas Eve Brandon incident) in a case of something clearly newsworthy.”
Bret Stephens, a columnist for the New York Times, raised the issue in mid December. He pointed out that the then-77-year-old Biden had referred to himself in the 2020 campaign as a “transition figure.”
Stephens clearly thinks that the transition may have already arrived. Calling out Biden’s “alarming incoherence,” he scorned journalists who pretend that “it doesn’t much matter whether he has the fortitude for the world’s most important job, so long as his aides can adroitly fill the gaps. As if accusations of ageism and a giant shushing sound from media elites can keep the issue off the public mind.”
The media haven’t always been so leery of bringing up the issue of a president’s ability to stay sharp through a full four-year term in office. A faltering Reagan performance in a 1984 presidential debate with Walter Mondale prompted a flurry of media scrutiny. A New York Times headline read: “Fitness Issue — New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve.” Reagan responded with a better performance and humor in the next debate — “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience” — and successfully squashed the issue.
President Trump was also put under the microscope after awkwardly holding a glass, and slowly descending a ramp after a speech — both of which attracted close media attention. Stephens points out that Trump’s “constricted vocabulary repeatedly prompted unflattering speculation about his health, mental and otherwise.” When someone is president such questions are inevitable and, indeed, part of the analysis of his decision-making process.
With Joe Biden, the speculation is that he is steered by a staff that either pushes their own agenda or blindly improvises on tactics they think Biden would approve of. Sometimes that blindness to political realities leads to disaster. Senators who’ve known Biden for decades are astonished that a veteran of 36 years in the Senate would have mishandled negotiations over his Build Back Better plan so badly.
Senator Joe Manchin, who has worked with Biden for over a decade in Washington, has been careful not to blame the president. He explained to reporters he was angry at Biden’s staff:
They know the real reason, what happened. . . . It’s staff-driven. I understand it’s staff. It is not the president. This is staff. And they drove some things, and they put some things out, that were absolutely inexcusable. They know what it is.
Other senators have told me that Biden suffers from “a staff infection” he’s not fully aware of, which has limited his success on Capitol Hill.
The United States faces an array of challenges, from the pandemic to aggression by such adversaries as China, Russia, and Iran. It may not be pleasant, but it’s time for the media to wake from their slumber and start doing some real reporting. How much time is Biden spending on the job? What is his staff shielding him from? Was he aware of the meaning of the “Let’s Go Brandon” phrase and, if not, why? It may seem trivial, but if the president is unaware of the crude catchphrase in widespread use by his critics, what else is he missing?
A few reporters have had the gumption to do some reporting on this.
In their new book Peril, Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa noted that Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, adviser Anita Dunn, and others intentionally keep the president away from unscripted events or interviews where he might misspeak. Woodward and Costa called it a “cocooning of the president” known as “the wall.”
Maybe it’s time for reporters to start tearing down that wall — or unraveling the cocoon. Back in Bob Woodward’s heyday in the 1970s, the reporting on the inner workings of the presidency was of a much sharper edge. The catchphrase of the Watergate investigation was, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
I’m not suggesting that what’s behind Biden’s unwillingness to do interviews is a major scandal. But that doesn’t mean that reporters shouldn’t again start asking: “What does the president know, and when does he know it?”