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.
Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?
After a disastrous debate performance and a weak damage-control interview last Friday, it’s finally become clear to almost everyone that President Joe Biden is not running the federal government.
Every four years, we’re supposed to pretend that a single individual, who we collectively choose at the ballot box, takes charge of the federal government and acts as we would to address the problems we face at home and abroad.
Biden’s inability to get through a debate and a sit-down interview without issues shatters the illusion that he is the one running things in Washington and across America’s globe-spanning sphere of influence.
So, if Biden is not actually running the government, who is?
There are, of course, the people around Biden. Some of his family members—like his wife, Jill Biden, and son, Hunter Biden—have been especially close by these last weeks as the president weathers the debate fallout. There’s also Biden’s closest advisors and political confidants like Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, and Ted Kaufman, who have been at the president’s side since he decided to run in 2020. Finally, there’s the White House staff who does much, if not all, of the day-to-day work.
But this group makes up only a small part of the broader power structure in Washington. To understand where federal power truly lies, we have to zoom out.
The political class in America is made up of countless organizations, departments, and factions. However, four unique groups can be defined.
First are the politicians and all those who are appointed by politicians. Think of presidents, senators, and representatives, but also cabinet members, ambassadors, and federal judges. These are many of the most-visible members of the political class. They’re who people picture when they think of American politics.
Second, there are all the unelected bureaucrats who make up the permanent, administrative components of the federal government. Most of them can be found in the dozens of executive agencies located in and around Washington, DC. Where the first group is made up of a couple thousand people, the second group accounts for close to three million. It’s the bulk of the federal government.
The third group is what we can call the official or “court” intellectuals. These are the “experts” in academia and at think tanks, as well as the “journalists” at the most prominent media organizations, who excuse and justify the actions and ambitions of the rest of the political class.
As Murray Rothbard explained in the third chapter of Anatomy of the State, political authorities have always relied on intellectuals to affirm the state’s legitimacy in the minds of the broader population. Intellectuals, who are often frustrated with how little people are willing to pay for their intellectual services, are easily lured into serving the state’s interest in exchange for official recognition, access, and tax dollars.
The fourth and final group are the plutocrats. They are the people and firms who owe their profits and wealth to the actions of the federal government and who lobby and pay to use government power to line their pockets. Think of the heads of the big banks or the weapons companies that supply Washington’s war machine.
These four groups form the coalition that makes up the political class. The “establishment” simply refers to the established, or current, political class. And, together, this coalition works to empower and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Court intellectuals use their establishment-sanctioned “expertise” to argue that society’s problems must be solved with government interventions. Politicians offer to enact these interventions in exchange for votes and donations. Plutocrats work to warp the interventions to their own benefit and then lobby and pay politicians to legislate even more lucrative interventions. After they are enacted, the easily predicted bad consequences of the interventions are used by court intellectuals and politicians to justify even more interventions.
Meanwhile, the bureaucratic group gains jobs, money, and power that it works with court intellectuals to protect and expand. The ever-growing interventions build up more government power that is then offered up to interested plutocratic buyers. All the while, politicians put on their sham fights with each other over minor policy differences along with their electoral and legislative rituals to obscure the scam and to keep us all believing that we live in a representative democratic republic.
That is the cycle churning in Washington, DC. The fact that the president is cognitively impaired is essentially irrelevant.
That is unless it begins to wake the American public up to the fact that the government does not work for us like we were all taught it does in elementary school. But until then, the churn continues.
The Divided President
Beneath Joe Biden’s avuncular, aw-shucks demeanor lies an ego even larger than his mouth. Three presidential campaigns across three separate decades say everything one needs to know about the man’s sense of himself and his role in history. And it must come as some relief to Biden that history still has a role for him. The Cold War that shaped American politics for most of his career has given way not to an age of international peace and untroubled prosperity but to an era of political and economic upheaval in which his can-do optimism is still very much in demand. Or, at least, this is what he and his boosters assure us. The institutions of American democracy are still worthy of our faith; what we need is the right person with the right intentions at their helm.
To the surprise of many, Biden and the Democrats in Washington have managed to pull some real and even transformative policy victories out of those sclerotic institutions over the course of his term so far. He signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s first major climate bill, into law. Together with the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Bidenomics—the White House’s label for its industrial programs—has reasserted the federal government’s role in driving economic investment. There have been less heralded victories, like the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major gun control legislation to be passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. And Biden has also used the powers of his office to push a pro-labor, pro-competition agenda through the executive agencies.
Nevertheless, Biden is entering his reelection campaign as a weak and embattled incumbent. Voters remain deeply pessimistic about an economy that, by conventional measures, has actually improved under his watch. Biden’s age now weighs heavily on the public’s mind. And the administration’s response to the crisis in Gaza has cratered Biden’s standing with progressives, including those who cheered the withdrawal from Afghanistan not so long ago. That fulfilled promise and the investments of Bidenomics seemed, for a time, to quell the impatience over all that the Democrats have left undone on key issues, from immigration to democratic reform. Gaza has changed all that. While the press might have welcomed Biden into the White House with comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt—comparisons that Biden encouraged—he now finds himself dogged by less flattering comparisons to Lyndon Johnson, whose grand domestic policy agenda ended up being overshadowed by the blood that he allowed to be cruelly and uselessly shed in Vietnam.
Presidential historians looking back at the past few years will document Biden’s failures in greater detail than we can now, of course, but they’ll also take care to note, if they’re any good, that even the best presidents and most capable administrations find themselves buffeted and dazed by forces and events outside their control. The competence and character of well-placed individuals, as Biden and his backers insist, really do matter. But structural conditions and the movements shifting politics outside the White House always matter too. Though Biden may have insisted at the outset of his presidency “that he would prove that democracy could still deliver for its citizens, that it hadn’t lost its capacity to accomplish big things,” as Franklin Foer writes in The Last Politician, his new book on the first two years of the Biden administration, his successes on that score have been more the product of a sea change in Democratic politics than his own leadership. And his odds of keeping the presidency might rest on whether he comes to recognize that.
In Foer’s view, many of Biden’s achievements can be credited to his personality and character: He’s a skilled and uncommonly sensitive statesman, possessed of all the dealmaking acumen that Donald Trump so often boasted about and so obviously lacked. “As I reported on him at close distance,” Foer writes, “my respect for him grew. I came to appreciate his ability to shelve his ego and empathetically understand the psychology of the foreign leaders he sparred with and the senators he wooed.”
But strangely, one comes away from Foer’s closely observed account of the Biden White House with the impression that Biden’s successes have often been achieved in spite of an evidently fickle and mercurial temperament. Biden “deeply craves advice,” Foer tells us, “but is often stubbornly resistant to it.” On foreign policy, he is guided by a “swaggering sense of his own wisdom” and a contempt for “the mandarins” of the foreign-policy Blob “trying to muddy things up with their abstractions and theories.” While we’re told that Biden resents “the presence of trust-fund kids who showed up in Washington as interns,” he nevertheless takes pride in his staff of Ivy Leaguers, whom he introduces to visitors as “his meritocratic trophies.”
In the Joe Biden that Foer gives us, we have yet another president—the third in this young century—who seems to act substantially from the gut. And while that’s worked out well for progressives here and there, Biden’s personality and conservative instincts have also been obstacles for leftward progress.
During the 2020 campaign, for instance, he repeatedly promised to lift the cap on refugees imposed during the Trump administration, a pledge that was directly reaffirmed to Congress in February 2021, even as the swelling number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border began drawing public attention and criticism. “It was an important symbolic reversal,” Foer writes. “And all that it required was Biden signing paperwork approving the funding for it. But in a cantankerous mood when considering it, he doubted whether he should. In an early March meeting that included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, he nodded in the direction of his longtime adviser, a passionate proponent of raising the cap. ‘They want me to increase the number of people in the country, but that’s kind of crazy.’”
After the White House announced in April that Biden would be reneging on his promise and leaving Trump’s cap in place for at least the year ahead, staffers including chief of staff Ron Klain and Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice embarked on a plan to gently nudge the president back to his original position, an effort that involved managing Biden’s temper. “It was perfectly clear that Biden would keep raising the subject himself, usually in meetings about the border crisis, usually with an edge of aggression,” Foer tells us. “He moaned, ‘Can you believe that they want me to go back to those high numbers?’ At a moment like that Susan Rice would shoot a glance across the room, which told aides, ‘Don’t take the bait.’”
Eventually, the improvement of conditions at the border created an opening for a more forceful push. Biden staffer Amy Pope was sent to a weekly meeting on the border with the paperwork for lifting the refugee cap in hand. Trying to seal the deal, Pope observed that by raising the refugee cap, Biden could help secure his legacy. Foer tells us that this line set Biden off. “‘I don’t care about my legacy,’ he shot back. In the moment, Biden’s logic shifted. All he cared about, he said, was treating the refugees humanely.” Without much further ado, he signed the document on the spot.
Anecdotes like this undermine Foer’s praise for Biden’s personal and political acumen a fair bit. The president is a rather insecure man; he needs to be constantly prodded and managed by those around him in ways that flatter his ego. In March 2022, when Biden paid a visit to Poland, he gave a speech that ended with a shocking bit of improvisation. “For God’s sake,” he thundered of Vladimir Putin, “this man cannot remain in power.” That impromptu call for what sounded like regime change in Russia was immediately walked back by his aides, and it left Biden feeling even more surly. “Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes. “Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?” Joe’s no Jack Kennedy, but as the remark suggests, he’s spent a lifetime working to become a figure of Kennedy’s stature.
“As a young senator,” Foer notes, “he gave rousing addresses that aspired to the lyricism of the Kennedys, rife with verbal pyrotechnics, moments of soaring eloquence. They seemed a source of pride for him, evidence of how he mastered public speaking, the very thing that had once debilitated him.” And the Poland speech, in Biden’s view, was an increasingly rare opportunity to prove that he could speak as movingly and memorably as JFK did—by way of “a grand exhortation about the moral imperative of thwarting authoritarianism.”
That grasping ambition is a critical part of who Biden is. He has always been a poor fit within the Democratic establishment he now commands. As he’s fond of reminding us, he really did grow up in a middle-class family from Scranton, Pa. He didn’t go to an Ivy League college. He was among the least affluent members of the Senate. And by his own admission, he’s a gaffe machine with a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Even after an uncommonly hefty vice presidency in which Biden took up, among other responsibilities, ending the war in Iraq and overseeing the implementation of the 2009 Recovery Act, he had to suffer the indignity of being shooed away from the 2016 race and was openly discouraged by party elites, including Barack Obama himself, from running yet again in 2020. Biden entered the race anyway, but even then he appeared hopelessly out of step with a party being pulled to the left, winning the nomination only after Democratic leaders and his opponents belatedly closed ranks behind him in order to thwart the advance of Bernie Sanders.
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the potential scale of the response it so obviously demanded did ultimately put Biden into more accord with progressives. And the refugee-cap episode and other moments in Foer’s book suggest that Biden can be tugged left, on occasion, by his advisers. But that only goes to show, as Foer’s account inadvertently makes clear, that the administration’s sprawling cast of supporting characters—including an inner circle of staffers (most of whom, ironically, are not committed progressives)—are perhaps more responsible for the progressive tilt of the administration than Biden himself is.
The Last Politician may be readers’ introduction to many of these staffers. We meet Biden’s unfussy and unpretentious speechwriter, Mike Donilon—“the closest thing the president has to an alter ego,” Foer writes—who shifts from feeding Biden the gospel of national unity to pushing for a more aggressive tone against Trump and Republican extremism and who tries, albeit with mixed success initially, to have Biden voice more outrage in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
We also meet White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, a former head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, whose appointment was castigated by progressives—though when we’re introduced to him in The Last Politician, Reed is cultivating Biden’s interest in corporate concentration and monopoly power, which leads to the appointment of two antitrust crusaders: Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission and Tim Wu to a position in the White House.
Of those closest to Biden, Ron Klain—who was White House chief of staff until last February and has worked for Biden on and off since young adulthood—has been particularly instrumental in pulling Biden in a more progressive direction, having moved left himself during Trump’s term. As Foer notes of Klain: “Over the [2020] campaign, he had formed an easy relationship with Bernie Sanders, who appreciated how quickly he responded to his calls and how he seemed open to suggestions. With appointments to administration jobs, he helped Elizabeth Warren place her protégés in top posts. He said explicitly that he wanted to avoid fights with the Left, on the cusp of a moment when the administration would need its support.”
While Donilon and Reed encouraged Biden to continue building support for his legislative agenda among moderate Republicans in the Senate, Klain—who had seen firsthand the Obama White House’s fruitless efforts to do likewise with the Affordable Care Act as Biden’s chief of staff at the time—urged Biden to take advantage of the Democrats’ narrow Senate majority and the budget reconciliation process to pass the American Rescue Plan.
Outside of this trio, whose members have known Biden and one another for around 40 years—“Ron Klain was the godfather of Reed’s child,” Foer observes at one point, and “Donilon and Klain went to Georgetown together, where Klain covered Donilon’s bid to become student body president in the student newspaper” —one other figure has had a particularly significant influence on the direction Biden has taken as president, despite having spent only about a decade or so in his orbit: Jake Sullivan.
Formally the national security adviser, Sullivan was also “the primary architect of the Biden domestic policy agenda,” Foer tells us, having pieced together the platform that would become known as “Build Back Better” while he worked on the Biden campaign. Sullivan came to that campaign as a scarred veteran of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run—in 2015, she had assigned him the task of figuring out what progressives were all riled up about in anticipation of a campaign against Elizabeth Warren.
Nothing in Sullivan’s résumé suggested that he’d be particularly well-suited to this task. A Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar who had found his way to Clinton’s side not long after finishing law school and then followed her into the Obama administration, Sullivan was elite Washington personified. Nevertheless, as he would eventually report back to Clinton, the critiques that Warren, Sanders, and progressive activists in the years after Occupy Wall Street were leveling at the Democratic establishment were too disquieting and too persuasive to be brushed aside. “While he wasn’t prepared to propose that Hillary Clinton adopt Elizabeth Warren’s policies, he pushed in that direction,” Foer writes. “On the whiteboard in his office during the Clinton campaign, he scrawled the word rents and left it there as a token of his growing hostility to monopoly.”
Whatever interest Clinton might have had in crafting a more progressive policy agenda evaporated with Trump’s nomination and the subsequent shift in the focus of the race. But Sullivan’s interest in that project survived the campaign and only deepened over the course of Trump’s term, which provoked soul-searching across the Democratic policy world, particularly among the party’s young professionals. “They didn’t just worry about Trump,” Foer writes. “They fretted about what would become of the Democratic Party. It seemed as though the party was fracturing, just like the nation.” And while some party leaders responded to that fracturing by continuing the time-honored tradition of angrily punching left, Sullivan and other like-minded aides went out of their way to hear the progressives out.
“One of Sullivan’s close collaborators on the Clinton campaign, Heather Boushey, organized a reconciliation tour,” Foer explains. “Along with Mike Pyle, who left the Obama White House to work in finance, she put together a series of dinners in Washington, New York, and San Francisco. Young establishment wonks broke bread with Elizabeth Warren disciples, labor union officials, and intellectuals from left-leaning think tanks. At these meals, the establishment found itself gravitating towards an alliance—or rather a confluence.”
That confluence would be reflected in Sullivan’s work patching together the Build Back Better agenda. And when one factors in everything that’s fallen under his purview in his official capacity as national security adviser—including his leading role in managing the withdrawal from Afghanistan—it begins to seem like we’ve been living these past three years under a Sullivan administration as much as a Biden one.
On the whole, Foer holds the Biden administration in high esteem, though he qualifies his enthusiasm when it comes to the withdrawal from Afghanistan—less irresponsibly managed than rushed, in his view—which he details in a lengthy, day-by-day account that takes up a substantial portion of his book’s middle section.
But even there, he finds things to admire. The rapid creation and management of a network of camps for Afghan refugees across Europe, he writes, required “a massive amount of quick diplomacy and logistical know-how,” and the administration’s officials rose to the challenge. “In the end, the US government housed sixty thousand Afghans in facilities, many of which didn’t exist before the fall of Kabul,” he notes. “It flew 387 sorties from [Kabul’s airport]. At the height of the operation, an aircraft took off every forty-five minutes. It was a terrible failure of planning that necessitated a mad scramble—a mad scramble that was an impressive display of creative determination.”
He assesses the administration’s early response to Covid similarly: The task of cleaning up Trump’s mess fell to a slate of officials that Foer introduces to us as an Avengers-style team of super-technocrats. “From all his years responding to once-in-a-century storms and toxic spills,” Foer writes, Covid supply coordinator Tim Manning, a former deputy administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “had learned how to make things happen in cramped conditions, how to move fleets of utility repair trucks across the nation overnight, and how to find housing for refugees fleeing all manner of apocalypses. He was trained to transcend the everyday practices of government.”
Meanwhile, former FDA commissioner David Kessler, “a well-known operator” and “a renowned pugilist with a long list of enemies,” was hired to boost the supply of vaccines and, backed by the provisions of the Defense Production Act, all but threatened Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel to that end in a dramatically rendered Zoom meeting. “Kessler played the heavy,” Foer writes. “‘The president has said these doses will be available by the middle of May. They will be available by the middle of May.’” It worked, and “within months, the state, in whose capacities the public held so little trust, made it possible for any adult to walk into a pharmacy and obtain a lifesaving shot…. Technocracy—roundly maligned—had produced one of the best designed, most important government programs of all time.”
The presidency is never really about one man. Although Foer’s narrative is framed at the outset as a dive into Biden’s gifts and experiences as a leader—the “last politician”—the story he actually tells is of an expansive administrative state that has placed a substantial amount of power in the hands of officials—the Sullivans, the Klains, the Reeds—whom a president chooses to take on as staff. These advisers and technocrats are not elected or directly accountable to the public in any real way. Indeed, they’re often people that the average voter wouldn’t even recognize on TV. But for better or for worse, they’ve come to exert more and more influence on policy and our lives.
This fact can make ascribing true, independent, and direct agency to the person ostensibly in charge difficult. Yet, at times, Foer does so confidently nonetheless—even though his own account invites readers to ask how much of what’s already being called Biden’s “legacy,” in this book and elsewhere, can be credited to Biden personally. The decision to stay the course on withdrawal from Afghanistan was, of course, Biden’s; divining responsibility for how it was done is a more complicated matter.
That said, there are actions the administration has taken that clearly bear Biden’s fingerprints. The administration’s handling of Gaza, for instance, is in large part the product of Biden’s own stubbornness. Beyond his confidence in his ability to charm Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu into submission, Foer also reminds us—in passages that read even more gravely now than they did when the book was published last September—that the defense of Israeli policy, whether in the United States’ interests or not, has been one of Biden’s longest-standing commitments. “Biden,” Foer notes, “was old enough to have met with Golda Meir on the eve of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He grew up in a world where most Americans, especially liberals, regarded Israel as a historical miracle and a sympathetic underdog.” Biden first met future House speaker Nancy Pelosi while she was organizing a fundraiser for Israel in the 1970s, Foer continues: “Biden was the keynote speaker. Pelosi loaned her Jeep, for the sake of squiring Biden around town so that he could extol the case for Zionism.”
While the American public is still largely supportive of Israel, the case for Zionism has taken a substantial hit in the aftermath of the Israeli response to Hamas’s October attack, particularly among Democrats.
Biden’s presidency has not been what most progressives would have wanted, and there’s little reason to believe, given Biden’s own politics and the Democratic Party’s current ideological composition, that it ever could have been, even if the Democrats had secured larger majorities in Congress than they had in the first two years of Biden’s term. It is true, thanks largely to the policy professionals that Biden has surrounded himself with, that it also hasn’t been the presidency most progressives feared. But Biden’s now-dismal standing in the polls as the campaign year starts in earnest suggests that he’ll have to rally more than tepid, grudging support from the Democratic base—and gain the faith of many more voters in the general electorate—in order to defeat Trump in November.
For a book called The Last Politician, it is notable that Foer’s narrative contains remarkably few instances of Biden engaging in what most would consider politics. There are almost no interactions chronicled with people who might be considered ordinary voters, and no notable episodes in which Biden tries to sell his policy agenda to the broader public. That’s not really an oversight on Foer’s part. Obama and Trump were highly visible and well-nigh inescapable presidents. But Biden has chosen to make himself scarce, partly to disguise his age and partly to fulfill a campaign promise—that anxious voters bewildered by the Trump years would finally be able to tune out the goings-on in the White House and in Washington. And they have—developing, as they’ve turned their attention elsewhere, a sense that Biden hasn’t been active or effective in addressing their concerns.
The crisis in Gaza hasn’t helped matters—especially since the broader public, including the overwhelming majority of Democrats, backs a cease-fire and a negotiated end to the conflict. Continued bloodshed may only deepen perceptions of Biden’s ineffectuality. But even if not, his reelection will surely depend on convincing voters that he has the energy and the political capital for a robust second term, in which he would be more of a felt presence than in the first. Technocrats and expertise may have put Bidenomics into action and carried much of his domestic policy agenda forward. But they will not help him at the polls.
Interview with Lindy Li, just her replies
Behind closed doors, three key advisers—Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, and Mike Donilon—wielded immense power, running the administration while Biden was the public face. Jill Biden and Hunter Biden were also instrumental in keeping Joe in the race, ensuring their influence remained intact.
who did you learn that has the most
0:02power behind closed doors that everybody
0:05fears that no one knows about who had
0:07the most power there were three of them
0:10Steve oh other than Jill Biden that was
0:12given right Jill Biden the wife she has
0:14tremendous power really yeah she was a
0:17president essentially for the past four
0:19years without a
0:21doubt without a doubt I’m actually
0:24convinced that if it weren’t for Jill
0:26Biden would have not run for re-election
0:28Jill and Hunter what what were the two
0:30people who kept him in the race because
0:32he was worried about his son’s Freedom
0:34his only remaining son and he was and
0:37Jill didn’t want to relinquish power she
0:39was Lady MC Biden as they
0:42say but um the three people who had the
0:44most power other than Jill who’s the
0:46obvious person Steve aett Mike Donald
0:47and Anita Dunn the senior
0:50advisers I was most close with Anita
0:52who’s actually very nice to
0:54me and what what what what gives you
0:58what gives them the kind of power they
1:00say they have like what could they do
1:02these could do anything what’s anything
1:04run the world so you’re telling me Anita
1:07D this is one this is Anita D which
1:09you’re saying she was nice to you yes
1:11and who were the other two you said
1:12Steve ret and Mike donalan Rob can you
1:15pull them
1:15up
1:18Steve did you say bashet r
1:21i it’s Italian ret yeah political last
1:25served at counselor to the President
1:26Biden who was also chairman of Joe Biden
1:282020 previously served as Chief of Staff
1:30to Biden during the Obama Administration
1:32Deputy Chief of operations under Clinton
1:35in between stins and Democratic
1:37Administration worked as a lobbyist and
1:39who was the last one you said Mike
1:40donalan and what’s significant about
1:42donalan is that he was the one feeding
1:46Biden the fake poll numbers saying that
1:48he could still beat Trump after the
1:50debate him right here him right there
1:52and you know what these people have in
1:54common well less so with Anita Anita is
1:55kind of a Obama veteran donalan and
1:58richet the reason why they reach that
2:00Pinnacle of power is because they’re
2:02longtime friends with Biden they’re not
2:04super smart Geniuses or anything like
2:06that their major credential is that is
2:09decades long loyalty in 1988 when Biden
2:13had to drop out because of plagiarism
2:14Donan was with
2:16him so they go way back before I was
2:19even alive got it so so they’re are they
2:23two of them are loyalist to Biden one of
2:25them Anita is a loyalist to Obama but
2:27also a loyal but she comes from Obama
2:29world but she’s also a loyalist to Biden
2:31she is known she Prides herself on
2:34holding Biden’s grudges that’s what she
2:35says
2:36yeah so Biden you know he’s mellowed out
2:39in his years um but Nita she’s a fighter
2:42she was the person who came up with dark
2:44Brandon remember that me yeah so grudges
2:48who were some of the people that Anita
2:49protected The Grudges from like if
2:51you’re saying he was about grudges who
2:52were some of the grudges with uh it has
2:55to be with the party with certain people
2:57exctly like people who dare to undermine
2:59Biden like for example Joe Mansion who
3:01wouldn’t pass this
3:02legislation um kamla Harris they hated
3:07her pre her Running Oh while she was
3:10abely there were do you remember in the
3:12first couple years of the term her
3:14office is constantly undergo turmoil
3:17right it was just there was so much
3:19drama people were leaving in droves
3:21there was so much
3:22turnover
3:24um Anita dun and crew they didn’t think
3:27highly of Harris she couldn’t run her
3:29own
3:30office and Ron clean who was the chief
3:33of staff at the time he was replaced by
3:34CH Zs he had to like come in like exert
3:38control over the situation so so far
3:40Mansion Kamala by the way did did Biden
3:43and Jill choose Kamala as the VP Jill
3:47hates kamla Harris always hates her
3:50recently or always viciously always
3:52because of the debate on if I remember
3:54correctly it was June 28th 2019 I
3:56remember when the bus thing I remember
3:58that exactly can you pull that up prop
4:00if you’re talking about the busting yeah
4:01and the bus thing I I was with Biden the
4:03next day in San Francisco um at a
4:07fundraiser and he was shook no one
4:10expected that to
4:12happen um and
4:14Jill was one of the people who opposed
4:18Biden picking kamla for VP but he kind
4:21of tied himself in knots when he
4:23promised to pick a black woman he left
4:25himself with a few options you
4:27know so was was Kamala chosen as the VP
4:32because Biden had to choose it based on
4:34what Trump said based on based on what
4:36Obama said or he wanted her because she
4:39was polling well and let me choose her
4:41as a VP instead of other guys by polling
4:44well you mean 1% then well at one point
4:46she got up to 17 I think at one point
4:48she was at 14% what dropped 1% and never
4:50recovered she didn’t even make it to
4:52Iowa so then why would you choose her as
4:53a as a VP two words James kurn who saved
4:58his ass in South Carolina so many things
5:01can be attributed to this guy because if
5:03it weren’t for James kurn we never would
5:05have had the Biden presidency why is
5:07that because he came in fifth in New
5:09Hampshire and lost Iowa terribly I
5:12remember and the only reason why he won
5:15South Carolina in such dramatic fashion
5:17was because James kurn who widely loved
5:20in the state endorsed him so if James
5:22klyburn doesn’t endorse him he doesn’t
5:25win South Carolina he’s done who would
5:27have been a replacement they were scared
5:29of would have been Sanders do you
5:31remember that all the moderates cess
5:35together exactly all well actually
5:37Warren was I mean she’s Progressive but
5:40all the moderates got together and
5:41endorsed Biden that night I think it was
5:43in a joint Valley in Houston um or I
5:47somewhere in Texas and um so Clyburn
5:50saved him and that with that came
5:53tremendous power he got him to promise
5:55that the VP would be a black woman that
5:57this next scotus pick would be a black
5:59woman
6:01so because so he’s that powerful C is
6:04that powerful he’s very powerful so oh
6:07you know who got him to sorry for this
6:10is a very important part that that I
6:11don’t want to forget Biden endorsed
6:13Harris 30 minutes after he dropped out
6:16do you remember I do on July 21st you
6:18know who told him to do that who’s that
6:21oh James cber but why does he owe the
6:23favor to him just because of him helping
6:25m in South without James there’s no
6:28presidency he would have been dead in
6:29the water do you remember everyone wrote
6:32him off for dead after New Hampshire it
6:33was that bad he was losing to Pete
6:38budich so is James kurn a person that’s
6:43close to is he part of Obama’s camp or
6:45he stands alone on his own he’s very
6:47much part of Biden’s Camp so he’s not an
6:50Obama guy he is I mean they’re all kind
6:52of there’s so much overlap but he’s very
6:54much a Biden
6:56loyalist the reason why so okay so we
6:58got the three names Rob if you go back
6:59to all the three names Anita being one
7:01of them okay you had Anita as one then
7:04we had um Steven ret then you had uh
7:09Michael uh donalan when he say they
7:12could do anything what were some of the
7:14things that they did that people feared
7:17because the question was are they feared
7:19my point is they were essentially the
7:21president behind the scenes and Biden
7:23was just the facade and that’s why Mike
7:26would give the wrong polls just to make
7:28Joe think that he can win he has
7:30that M could continue in power all of
7:32these people knew that this is a final
7:34gravy train that they would never be
7:36hired by another can you imagine like
7:37another Democratic candidate hiring
7:39these people just wouldn’t happen they
7:42are Biden creatures through and through
7:44they realize that this was their last
7:46act so what do they do now though like
7:48what what do they do now to make money
7:50are they lobbyist are they I’m sure
7:51they’re rich enough that they don’t have
7:52to work again due to what cuz that the
7:54job doesn’t paid that
7:57well due to what I mean these are the
8:00same people who came up with like
8:01barisma and the fact that Biden pardoned
8:06his family on the last day not just for
8:08the past year but all the way back to
8:112014 these people Everyone that I just
8:14named they’re all part of Biden world
8:16all part the entire Biden World
8:18operation is influence pedaling I’m sure
8:20they’re fine like James Biden was
8:23wrapped up in this failed Hospital
8:25Network business they have businesses in
8:28Ukraine China all over over the place
8:29they’re going to be
8:32fine well I mean something funny is the
8:35the the FBI agent that I was talking to
8:37doj when they were dealing with the
8:39property that we bought she was also
8:41suing Joe Biden’s brother for the
8:43hospital thing yeah link to it very
8:46weird.
Who’s really running Biden’s White House? Step forward President Klain
The name’s Klain — President Klain. Washington insiders delight in assigning the White House chief of staff this mischievous title as the driving force behind the actual president, Joe Biden. The man himself, Ron Klain, would never describe himself this way, but his firm grip on the levers of government has enabled the 78-year-old president to cruise through his first 100 days in office without breaking sweat.
Everybody who is anybody in Washington knows Klain, although few people outside the Beltway — the ring road surrounding the capital — have heard of him. He is a powerful, confident operator who knows the business of government inside out. Trusted to exercise power and take decisions, he keeps his boss informed while lifting the burden of office from him.
Klain, 59, has recently emerged from the shadows as the surprising face of the administration on Twitter, where he touts Biden’s achievements with gusto under the handle @WHCOS, for White House chief of staff. His output is very different in style to Donald Trump’s but equally triumphal. Among his latest tweets was a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 55 per cent of Americans approved of Biden’s job performance, as opposed to 38 per cent who disapproved. He also highlighted a Washington Post article headlined: “No wonder the president has a bounce in his step.”
That bounce, such as it is, is down to Klain, the ultimate enabler. For those who find the scale of Biden’s colossal $6 trillion spending plans hard to square with the moderate politician who has been knocking around Washington for half a century, look no further than “President Klain”. He is determined to secure Biden’s place in the pantheon of presidents, with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who built the American welfare state.
Having achieved his life’s ambition by reaching the White House, Biden’s goal is to remain in office as long as possible — two terms, preferably. This means he is “pacing himself” in the job, as a seasoned official told me wryly.
The president’s address to Congress last week, in which he unveiled the third tranche of his stimulus package — the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan — was delivered at 9pm to reach West Coast viewers. That is late for him. Most days, Biden works from 9am until 6pm or 7pm, before retiring to his private quarters. His wife, Jill, whom he gallantly presented with a dandelion on the White House lawn on Friday, also makes sure he gets plenty of rest.
Weekends are often spent in Delaware, to which he flies on Air Force One (a smaller plane than the usual wide-bodied jet, as the runway is too short). “The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many years,” the White House press secretary said recently.
Klain served as chief of staff for Biden when Barack Obama became president
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Biden is letting his team take the strain, and that is how they like it. “There is nothing wrong with delegating. It’s a lesson the Democrats should have learnt from Ronald Reagan,” a former White House official told me. The president is served by an inner cadre of half a dozen officials who know him backwards. “The price of entry into this club is a minimum of ten years working with Joe Biden,” he added.
At its apex is Klain, a Harvard law graduate who was clerking at the Supreme Court when he joined Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988 as a junior speechwriter. A year later Klain became chief counsel to the Senate judiciary committee, then chaired by Biden. A former colleague recalled his appointment raising eyebrows. “I see you’ve just hired a 27-year-old,” a fellow senator chided Biden. “Well, I can remind you I was elected a senator at 29,” Biden retorted.
Since then, the two men have been virtually inseparable. “Even when Ron was off the staff, if Biden was doing one of the Sunday television shows he would have a pre-call with Ron about what he should say,” the same colleague told me.
Klain is not just Biden’s “brain” but has spent more time than his boss in government. He served four years as chief of staff to Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice-president, before taking on the same role for Biden when Barack Obama became president. Only once did he fall out with the Biden camp, when he joined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign without consulting him.
“I’m dead to them,” Klain wrote in an email disclosed by WikiLeaks during the huge document dump that helped to seal Donald Trump’s victory. Yet he was soon back in favour. His expertise in government, knowledge of arm-twisting in Congress and skills as a lobbyist proved too valuable.
Klain was not only the “ebola tsar” under Obama — a useful primer for handling the Covid-19 pandemic — but did a lot of the heavy lifting when Obama appointed Biden “stimulus sheriff” after the 2008 financial crash. Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, is a climate change expert who has just been nominated to a top oceans, environment and science job at the State Department.
Beating the pandemic, stimulating the economy, taking climate change seriously — these are all Biden administration priorities. In particular, Klain has thrown his weight behind the “go big” spendathon that has come to define Biden’s first 100 days. Klain describes the task as “rebuilding the backbone of the country, rebuilding the soul of the country”.
Biden has won applause on the left for the return of big government after decades of bending the knee to Reaganomics. Yet it is not only Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Obama, who is raising the alarm about the “substantial risk” of inflation. A former colleague and admirer of Klain told me he had only one downside: “Ron is so smart he doesn’t understand when he is wrong.”
Klain has argued that nobody should be surprised by Biden’s boldness as president
ALAMY
A lot is riding on the success of Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure plans, not least the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the midterm elections next year. So far his policies are proving popular, although he is on the defensive over immigration and “woke” cultural wars. But plenty of moderate Democrats are concerned that he is betting the farm on progressive policies in a divided nation for which the party has no mandate.
Biden, they thought, was on their side, as was his White House chief of staff. What happened? Klain has argued that nobody should be surprised by the president’s boldness. “He laid this out in pretty elaborate, often mind-numbing detail over the course of the campaign — very detailed policy papers and very long speeches,” Klain was quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal last week. “Everything we are doing is what we said we were going to do.”
Yet the point is that Biden was not expected to deliver on all those promises. They were devised as a “peace treaty” with Bernie Sanders, his rival for the Democratic nomination, who had a huge number of die-hard supporters on the left whom Biden needed to rally behind his own candidacy (after all the damage they caused Hillary Clinton). Once in government, the policies were supposed to be safely trimmed or dropped.
Six “unity task forces” were set up, covering the economy, climate change, health, education, immigration and criminal justice reform. When the economic plan was released without much fanfare in July, a senior campaign aide described it as the “largest mobilisation of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and [research and development] since the Second World War.”
If anybody read this statement, they did not believe it. Even the new left, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been surprised by the scale of Biden’s ambition.
What some of these trillions will be spent on remains anyone’s guess. Sharp observers have noticed that Brian Deese — the “infrastructure guy” in charge of the National Economic Council — recently talked on a New York Times podcast about “shovel-worthy” rather than “shovel-ready” projects that have yet to be determined.
Klain believes the impressive degree of unity forged in the Democratic Party can be replicated in the country at large. But are former Republican and independent suburban voters who helped to secure Biden’s victory ready to endorse the biggest left-wing experiment for decades?
In the words of his former colleague: “You’ve got to assume Ron’s doing a very good job. He understands government as well as anybody.” Others are adopting the brace position. Either way, Biden has a remarkably dedicated wingman.
Resources
mises.org, “Biden Is Not Running the Government. So, Who Is?” By Connor O’Keeffe; thenation.com, “The Divided President.” By Osita Nwanevu; thetimes.com, “Who’s really running Biden’s White House? Step forward President Klain.” By Sarah Baxter;
Biden Postings
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/07/how-does-the-biden-sanders-platform-compare-to-the-1936-ussr-constitution/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/11/has-china-enriched-the-biden-family-monetarily/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/09/10/is-china-helping-biden-become-president/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/21/biden-and-his-mask-does-it-give-him-super-powers/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/10/if-you-are-voting-for-biden-consider-psychiatric-help/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/07/01/twelve-mainstream-politicians-6-of-12-joe-biden/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/06/13/is-joe-biden-competent-to-be-president-under-the-25th-amendment/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/14/what-will-happen-if-biden-reverses-trumps-accomplishments/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/16/hunter-biden-and-his-kingdom-of-corruption/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/12/01/is-biden-a-trojan-horse/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2020/11/07/how-does-the-biden-sanders-platform-compare-to-the-1936-ussr-constitution/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/02/11/bidens-first-two-weeks-as-president/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/05/09/who-is-pulling-the-strings-in-the-biden-administration/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/05/21/is-the-biden-administration-responsible-for-an-uptick-in-human-trafficking/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2021/08/24/is-biden-incompetent-or-indifferent/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/01/01/our-country-one-year-in-the-biden-presidency/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2022/10/28/should-biden-throw-in-the-towel/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2023/05/26/what-effect-has-the-biden-familys-activities-had-on-the-u-s/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/01/18/the-3-men-at-the-core-of-bidens-brain-trust/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/02/27/do-you-feel-sorry-for-biden-hell-no/
https://common-sense-in-america.com/2025/08/08/who-was-running-the-government-under-the-biden-presidency/