The 3 Men at the Core of Biden’s Brain Trust

photorandy2023

1 year ago

I have written several articles on our Presidential candidate Biden and President Biden. A list of the links have been provided at the bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on Biden’s presidency.

President Biden has a diverse group of advisers, but few have the influence of three men in his inner circle during his final campaign.

Multiple times each day, President Biden dials up Mike Donilon, a close adviser since the 1980s, to chew on the latest polls and headlines.

“What’s your instinct? What do you think?” Mr. Biden will ask Mr. Donilon, who recently left the White House for the campaign’s Delaware headquarters.

Once a week, Mr. Biden summons Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, to workshop the best attacks to use against former President Donald J. Trump as the presidential debate draws closer.

When he leaves for Delaware on weekends, Mr. Biden seeks out Ted Kaufman, a confidant who represents the president’s ties to the state that introduced him to the national stage more than a half-century ago. It was Mr. Kaufman who was brutally direct with Mr. Biden when a plagiarism scandal threatened his first campaign for president in 1987.

“There’s only one way to stop the sharks,” Mr. Kaufman told him at the time, “and that’s pull out.” Mr. Biden did.

Interviews with dozens of people close to the president reveal a truth at the heart of Mr. Biden’s political life: While he is surrounded by a diverse and multigenerational crowd of campaign operatives, policy experts and cabinet secretaries, he reserves his full trust for a small circle of insiders who are the definition of old school.

The three are at the center of the Biden world, part of an echo chamber where dissent is rare. In important moments, each has told the president news he did not want to hear, although not one of them said no when the president was considering whether to run for a second term. They are also decades older than the young voters who could decide the election, which worries many of the president’s allies.

Mr. Klain is the youngest at 62. Mr. Donilon is 65. Mr. Kaufman is 85, four years older than Mr. Biden. Each has earned the president’s trust over not just years but decades. On this last of Mr. Biden’s four presidential campaigns, the three are his political comfort animals on speed dial.

“They not only have Biden’s trust but they have the trust of everyone who matters most to him,” meaning the president’s family members and particularly Jill Biden, the first lady, said Michael LaRosa, a former East Wing press secretary and special assistant to Mr. Biden. “It is very rare that you have the trust, respect and confidence from both of them. That’s a very uncommon level of dependency all three men possess in that orbit.”

They have been with Mr. Biden through some of the worst moments: Two aneurysms. His time as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman during the fight over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork. The withering criticism he faced after his aggressive questioning of Anita Hill in the hearings for Clarence Thomas’s nomination. The death of Mr. Biden’s son Beau.

“They all share a layer of scar tissue in common with both Bidens that few others can understand,” Mr. LaRosa said.

Mr. Donilon and Mr. Klain have traveled to Camp David in recent days to help prepare Mr. Biden for his debate on Thursday in Atlanta with Mr. Trump. They are joining a rotating cast of aides — including Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who runs the campaign — visiting the retreat.

(The part of Mr. Trump will be played in practice sessions by Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney.)

Mr. Kaufman is not expected to be at Camp David but is never out of reach when Mr. Biden needs gut-checks and support.

“It’s not like he needs to figure out what he believes on a subject,” said Mark Gitenstein, the ambassador to the European Union who first worked as a lawyer for Mr. Biden more than four decades ago. “It’s: ‘If I make this argument, does this work? Or should I try this argument?’”

Mr. Klain, the president’s whisperer with progressives and viewed as an expert at wielding the levers of government, managed the 2022 nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Mr. Donilon, said to channel Mr. Biden’s voice as well as the president himself, is the architect of the campaign’s theme that democracy is at stake if Mr. Trump wins. Mr. Kaufman is basically kin: In 1972, he was standing with Mr. Biden’s family at the Hotel du Pont on the night of his first Senate victory.

All three declined to comment for this article.

“President Biden values diverse points of view and is proud of his full team of advisers, including recent arrivals and longtime aides,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.

Still, a former adviser said Biden’s tight circle frustrates everyone outside of it.

“Having advisers that are close friends and refusing to listen to others is the kiss of death,” said John Kasich, a former Republican governor of Ohio who endorsed Mr. Biden at the 2020 Democratic convention.

“They absolutely have been too insular in the way they do things, and I think there’s probably been a deliberate effort to keep dissonant voices out,” he said. “When your circle’s too small, you know, it’s a disadvantage in anything you do.”

Mr. Biden has an answer for them. “I was working on this,” the president will say with a smile, “before you were born.”

The Strategist

At the end of April, Ron Klain confidently told a cable TV host: “I think there will be debates.”

Two weeks later, the president formally challenged Mr. Trump to two debates, setting out conditions that precisely matched the ones Mr. Klain had outlined publicly on the MSNBC program. It was no coincidence.

Mr. Klain no longer occupies the big office down the hall from the Oval. But the two men continue to talk nearly every day. The calls and visits are, more often than not, instigated by the president, who leans on Mr. Klain for short-term tactical advice and longer-term strategy.

Last month, Mr. Klain said he would take time off from his job as chief legal officer at Airbnb to help prepare Mr. Biden for the two debates with Mr. Trump. Several Biden advisers said that Mr. Klain is able to redirect Mr. Biden when he meanders, a prized skill when the work involves cutting the loquacious president’s remarks into debate-sized sound bites.

“That’s a really good point, sir,” Mr. Klain will say, before guiding the president back to the original point. Mr. Klain, whom Republicans sometimes referred to as Mr. Biden’s “prime minister,” is the author of 21 debate rules for candidates. No. 10: “Punches are good, counterpunches are better.”

In debate preparations, Mr. Klain is known to replay videotapes of Mr. Biden’s past debates, focusing on slip-ups or responses that ran on for too long. Mr. Biden, who is not used to taking blunt criticism from anyone, then incorporates Mr. Klain’s feedback into his next practice round, according to a longtime Democratic operative who has seen the pair work together.

Mr. Klain’s presence in the president’s orbit is a testament to their relationship — not quite son and father, but more than staffer and boss. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Mr. Klain was still a law student at Harvard when he first worked for Mr. Biden in the Senate 38 years ago, eventually rising to become chief counsel on Mr. Biden’s Judiciary Committee.

Klain, the president’s whisperer with progressives who is viewed as an expert at wielding the levers of government, managed the 2022 nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Donilon, said to channel Biden’s voice as well as the president himself, is the architect of the campaign’s theme that democracy is at stake if Trump wins. Kaufman is basically kin: In 1972, he was standing with Biden’s family at the Hotel DuPont on the night of his first Senate victory.

But he was not always by Mr. Biden’s side.

Mr. Klain briefly served as Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff.

Mr. Klain was briefly chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore and oversaw the recount effort in Florida in 2000. (He was later portrayed in a movie by Kevin Spacey.) He was involved in John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and spent some years as an adviser to Steve Case, a founder of AOL.

Mr. Biden’s trust was tested in 2015 when Mr. Klain went to work for Hillary Clinton as she pursued the presidency, signing on before Mr. Biden had formally decided against a run of his own. “I am definitely dead to them,” Mr. Klain later fretted to a colleague in an email that was part of a trove of documents revealed by WikiLeaks.

But Mr. Klain eventually returned to the center of the president’s universe as his first White House chief of staff, over the initial reservations of a still-skeptical Jill Biden, according to people familiar with the decision.

Behind the scenes, he drafted Democratic talking points that excoriated Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia for pulling his support for the president’s economic plan, but later made up with him over a pork roast at the home of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Long hours in the West Wing, an ailing mother and too many greasy hamburgers from the Navy mess forced Mr. Klain to make a tearful exit in early 2023. On his final day in the White House, Mr. Klain broke down in tears as he said: “This is the best job I’ve ever had.”

The Guru

Mike Donilon, more than anyone else, helps Mr. Biden frame his actions in a way that supports the longstanding Biden narrative.

Shortly after Mr. Donilon decamped from the White House in January to help oversee Mr. Biden’s campaign from Delaware, he reached out to allies, asking for advice. The White House creates a bubble around its occupants — a former adviser to President Barack Obama described it as like working within a “submarine” — and Mr. Donilon wanted a view from outside.

“Tell me what I need to know,” Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, recalled Mr. Donilon asking her at a party. “I need you to tell me the truth.” Ms. Dingell would only say that she told Mr. Donilon that “Michigan is a purple state,” and that the campaign should operate accordingly.

It often falls to Mr. Donilon to deliver the news of polls that show the president struggling, or more recent ones that suggest some improvement. And it is Mr. Donilon — more than anyone else — who helps Mr. Biden frame his actions in a way that supports the longstanding Biden narrative.

In 2020, he devised the winning strategy for the president’s campaign against Mr. Trump: focus on the threat to democracy, he told Mr. Biden.

“In my view, every presidential campaign is won or lost with the very first decision you make, which is, what is it about?” Mr. Donilon said at a forum at the Harvard Kennedy School after the election. “Why are you doing it? And the problem that most campaigns have is they never reach, with any clarity, an answer to that question.”

Understated, with a shock of white hair and bushy eyebrows, Mr. Donilon is viewed as a sphinx by his more talkative colleagues, sitting silently during conversations with the president. But few aides command the president’s attention as fully as Mr. Donilon.

In his book, “Promise Me, Dad,” Mr. Biden recalled the night of Oct. 20, 2015, as the small circle of friends and family met to decide whether he would run for president that year. Mr. Donilon sat quietly looking at Mr. Biden as he considered the idea of a run just months after the death of Beau.

“I caught him looking at me and gestured, What is it, Mike?” Mr. Biden wrote. “‘I don’t think you should do this,’ he said.” Mr. Biden decided against running that year, waiting another four years to challenge Mr. Trump.

The three longtime advisers may be of a generation long before social media, but Democrats say Mr. Biden’s campaign runs like a sophisticated presidential re-election machine should: Operatives pore over polling and voter micro-data, target crucial communities in the swing states and aggressively use social media to reintroduce Mr. Biden to younger Americans.

Yet Mr. Donilon is consulted on virtually every major decision. He is often joined by other longtime aides, including Anita Dunn, who oversees communications strategy, and Steve Ricchetti, who manages relationships on Capitol Hill. The president also leans on Bruce Reed for policy advice. Ms. Dunn, Mr. Ricchetti and Mr. Reed have been with Mr. Biden for years, but have not clocked the same mileage with the president as the core counselors.

Mr. Donilon may be the closest thing that Mr. Biden has to an alter ego — someone who can divine what the president is thinking and translate it into a political message. It was Mr. Donilon who guided Mr. Biden through his public response after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. Mr. Donilon, aware that the Irish Catholic president was uncomfortable talking about abortion, framed the issue in Mr. Biden’s speeches as a matter of personal freedom and privacy.

His value, people who know Mr. Biden say, is understanding how the president would want to address an issue before it ever reaches the Oval Office.

The Confidant

Ted Kaufman has been ever-present, starting in the earliest days of Mr. Biden’s political career.Credit…Bonnie Cash/Reuters

In early January this year, Mr. Biden and Mr. Kaufman spent almost two hours at the Fieldstone Golf Club Grille in Wilmington, not far from the president’s home away from the White House.

There are few moments in Mr. Biden’s political and personal life that the two haven’t shared, and little they don’t discuss. Mr. Kaufman, who has a fast-talking, blunt style, is less forthcoming about the details of their meetings.

“It’s my policy to not talk about my discussions with the president,” he often says.

Mr. Kaufman, a Philadelphia native who lives in Wilmington full time now, has been ever-present. Starting in the earliest days of Mr. Biden’s political career, he has made appearances including a seemingly endless string of local Democratic fund-raisers around the country. Mr. Kaufman, who was Mr. Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff, is one of the handful of advisers frequently at Mr. Biden’s Wilmington home.

When Mr. Biden took the Amtrak back and forth from Washington to Wilmington every day, Mr. Kaufman was often in the seat next to him. (His advice: If you don’t know the answer to one question when you brief him, that’s the question he will ask.) And Mr. Kaufman filled in as Delaware’s senator when Mr. Biden became vice president.

He has been entrusted with some of the most sensitive decisions Mr. Biden has made over the course of his career. In 1986, it was Mr. Kaufman who helped him quietly construct the blueprint for his first run for the presidency. “We’re just trying this out,” Mr. Biden would say.

Mr. Biden posing with Mr. Kaufman and his family after Mr. Kaufman was sworn in as the junior senator from Delaware in 2009.Credit…Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly, via Getty Images

More than 20 years later, Mr. Kaufman, fully aware of the scars of that race, was the only non-Biden in the room when Mr. Biden’s family sat him down and asked him to run again in 2008.

For the president, the lunches are more than just a moment to catch up with an old friend. He seeks out Mr. Kaufman to get insight from — and trade gripes with — a confidant whose instincts have always leaned toward protecting the Biden political brand. In 2020, it was Mr. Kaufman who managed Mr. Biden’s transition into the office he had sought for decades.

“Joe has long since said that Ted Kaufman is the wisest man he’s ever known,” Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister, wrote in her memoir. “Ted is his true north.”

Kate Bedingfield, who was a top communications adviser for Mr. Biden for years and is now a political commentator on CNN, said the three men are uniquely able to keep “the essence of Joe Biden” at the center of everything.

“Everyone understands and appreciates that when they speak for the president, they are channeling his voice in full,” she said. “Because very few people without the last name Biden know him better than those three.”

It’s not Biden’s brain that’s the problem, it’s his braintrust

Let’s pretend we’re on “Jeopardy.” Let’s also pretend it’s a year ago, and let’s also pretend the category is “2024 elections.”

Here’s your answer: “This presidential candidate is relying on his idiot son, his wife who has never held public office, and a tiny group of loyalists who would be out of a job should he not win the election in 2024.”

Buzzzzzz!

“Who is Donald Trump?”

That sure sounds like it should be the answer, right? Yeah, well, it’s not. According to a New York Times piece earlier this week, President Joe Biden is basically in a cocoon that consists of his wife, Jill, his son, Hunter, and that “tiny group of loyalists” mentioned above.

And this is almost certainly the crew that has been pulling to wool over our eyes for the last … well, for some time now. Based on that debate debacle — and the interviews and press conferences since then — it is clear to anyone that the Biden of today ain’t the Biden of 2020. I mean, like, abundantly obvious.

This isn’t breaking news, I get it, but it’s the reason Biden is toast if he stays in this race.

To be clear: It’s not because of his brain; it’s because of his braintrust.

In short: We’ve been lied to, led to believe that Biden’s brain is totally fine, nothing to see here. In fact, the braintrust is doubling down on this. But again: We have eyes and ears. We know when it’s time to take grandpa’s car keys away.

Seriously: If my father — who is 85 — was acting, speaking, walking, and talking the way Biden has been recently, it would be time for a family meeting. It would be time to discuss the future. It would be time to have the lawyers draw up power of attorney papers.

Which is exactly what a good chunk of the Democratic party is doing right now. They’re like, “Love ya gramps, but it’s time to give up the Buick.”

And the Biden braintrust reaction? “We good.”

Attention Biden braintrust: We ain’t good.

It certainly seems like there is zero chance Biden can defeat Trump, short of some October surprise or something. And again — I don’t think it’s because of Biden’s declining brain function.

It’s because we’re being lied to by his team.

Now, of course, Biden has COVID. The mental image of Biden with COVID, compared to the mental image of Trump’s bloody ear while he yells, “Fight, fight, fight!” isn’t doing the old fella any favors.

Say what you will about Trump — and boy howdy, do I have things to say — but the man clearly has a working brain. Sure, he rants and raves, but he’s quick-witted and clear-eyed.

Biden is not quick-witted or clear-eyed, and we’re still being told that he is.

The Democrats need to get rid of Biden yesterday, and they need to throw the nominating process open. There is no other option.

And it’s because the braintrust lied, and continues to lie.

Americans can tell the difference between rain and someone peeing on our leg, y’know?

Oh, and by the way Democrats: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer + a never-Trumper GOP member (you busy, Mitt?) is a winning ticket.

Biden’s campaign brain trust: Here are the key people to know

President Biden is expected to announce he will run for reelection in the coming weeks after spending some time consulting with his family and his closest advisers over the holidays.

Many of those advisers have been by Biden’s side for years — if not decades — making up his all-important brain trust.

Who is Biden leaning on as he revs up for another run?

Ron Klain

Biden’s chief of staff has the most outward visibility of anyone in his inner circle.

He has a constant presence on Twitter and routinely makes the rounds on cable and network news and with good reason: He not only has a mastery of Biden’s politics and policy, but most importantly he is entrenched in every part of the operation at the White House, Biden allies say.

Klain has kept a steady ship at the White House even during the rockiest of times. Biden’s Cabinet is the same at the two-year marker as it was at the start, and the West Wing has seen very little turnover in the first couple of years.

He’s also the one who has dropped the biggest hints to date about Biden’s intentions: “I expect the decision will be to do it,” Klain said last month at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit.

Steve Ricchetti

The White House senior adviser is known as the “Biden whisperer.” But in many ways, he’s also the president’s chief dealmaker in key moments on Capitol Hill — including the big infrastructure deal in 2021.

“He was the closer for us, full stop,” said one Biden ally. “He knows the president, the president trusts what he says. But he also earned the trust of folks on the other side of the negotiating table too.”

Having served as chief of staff to Biden during his time as vice president and chief strategist during the 2020 presidential campaign, Ricchetti understands how to frame a potential race for Biden and what he might be up against.

“He’s the Biden whisperer because he has a sense of what the landscape looks like,” one donor said.

Mike Donilon

At the end of the year, Biden’s senior adviser — who has been by the president’s side since 1981 — circulated a memo to “interested parties” about the successes of the administration in its first two years, something that sent a clear message about the president’s political prospects.

In the memo, Donilon, who is known for the major role he plays in speeches and the overall spoken word disseminating from the White House, made the case for why Biden should run again.

“In November, the President and the Democrats saw an historic midterm outcome — far stronger than the disastrous ‘Red Wave’ that had been predicted,” Donilon wrote.

“The result has been a strong jolt of momentum for the President as we move into the New Year. Just look at the results. Democrats gained Governors seats, flipped state legislatures, won crucial Secretary of State races, and held key districts in the House of Representatives. And President Biden became the first President since FDR in 1934 to not lose a single incumbent United States Senate seat,” he said.

Donilon and other aides have been working on Biden’s State of the Union for weeks, and it’s expected to be a guide for what the president will tout on the trail should he decide to run again.

Anita Dunn

The prominent communications adviser knows Biden’s style and his messaging arguably better than almost anyone else.

Dunn is credited with steadying the ship during Biden’s tumultuous 2020 campaign and has been an invaluable player at the start of Biden’s presidency.

“She’s been there for all the key moments, and that’s no coincidence,” the Biden ally said. “Her counsel matters a lot to the team and to the president and I’m sure he’s listening carefully to what she’s advising on his next steps.”

Jen O’Malley Dillon

The White House aide has been one of the few outsiders to crack Biden’s inner orbit after serving as his general election campaign manager.

In the halls of the West Wing, O’Malley Dillon, who serves as a deputy chief of staff, has been quietly laying the groundwork for another political run along with other aides.

She has been speaking with interest groups to keep them engaged and working on expanding the digital strategy for 2024.

In an interview with The Washington Post last month, she said, “The idea is not just to meet people where they are, but it’s to meet people everywhere they are.”

Biden allies say she knows what a second run will entail for Biden and is a major part of the launchpad for another run.

“She knows exactly what to expect,” one ally said.

Resources

nytimes.com, “The Insiders: The 3 Men at the Core of Biden’s Brain Trust.” By Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear; digitaledition.chicago.tribune, “Trio at core of Biden’s brain trust.” By Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear; Influence of these advisers unique in president’s circle thehill.com, “Biden’s campaign brain trust: Here are the key people to know.” By Amie Parnes; trentonian.com, “It’s not Biden’s brain that’s the problem, it’s his braintrust (JEFF EDELSTEIN COLUMN).” By Jeff Edelstein;