Biden’s low profile since the election has contributed to a sense of rudder in various parts of Washington as lawmakers, aides and party officials prepare for Trump’s return to power and seek a new direction and vision ahead of the midterm elections and 2028.
They said the White House and Biden have shown little interest in helping shape the party’s future after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Biden has focused his aides’ energy on managing the presidential transition and several final items intended to burnish his personal legacy, including Tuesday’s speech on the economy. Vice President Kamala Harris, who joined the election campaign as the future of the party, disappeared from the scene.
“There is no leadership coming from the White House,” one Democrat close to top lawmakers said bluntly. “There’s a complete void.”
Some Biden aides acknowledge that the president has not engaged in broader discussions about Trump’s future presidency and the future of the party. They say the reticence stems from two factors: Biden’s acknowledgment that few people want to hear from him, and his personal conviction that he owes no more to the party that has unofficially sidelined him. Some aides said he believes Biden should be more measured in how he talks about Trump, given his focus on facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates defended Biden, saying the president is “valuing every day of this term” and “keeping his campaign promise to lead by example for American democracy, respect the will of the voters and ensure an orderly transition.” .”
Still, the gap at the top has worried Democratic officials alarmed, and the country heads into next year without a concrete plan to fight Trump or even the financial motivation to fight back much. POLITICO spoke to almost two dozen party officials, lawmakers, current and former White House aides and other Democratic staffers for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity to provide their candid assessments.
“The election has consequences — it’s a new sheriff in town,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).
While Biden has offered little in the way of leadership, officials say the party’s rank-and-file, including lawmakers and aides, have little demand to hear from a president they still accuse of marginalizing them. Biden, 82, is at the end of a political career marred by his earlier refusal to step aside and the last-minute pardon of his son Hunter. Now few are clamoring for his return.
“They don’t even mention the name of the president in my conversations. It’s kind of sad,” said a Democrat close to top lawmakers. “It feels like Trump is already president.”
Many party officials and staff no longer follow Biden’s day-to-day activities or are even aware that he has spent much of the past month out of the country. The dominant conversation among them regarding the president in the past week has been whether to pardon Hunter, who was invited to a White House holiday party, and whether current and former White House staffers should take the traditional exit photo with the president.
“Democrats in Washington just want to get him and the people around him out the door,” said a former White House official. “Every move he’s made in the last year has hurt the party.”
There is some question as to whether Biden’s presence was missed even to tout his accomplishments.
Several Democratic lawmakers demurred last week when asked about the role they see Biden playing in the party.
“There’s a tradition of past presidents not getting too involved, and he’s transitioning,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.). “So I think he should be careful.”
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a close friend and ally of Biden, said he expected Biden to devote his post-presidential tenure to a number of pet issues, including cancer research and global diplomacy, and left his involvement in party affairs in the U.S. weather.
“I still think we’ve got a lot to learn from him going forward,” Coons said. “But, you know, there are a lot of other standard bearers that need attention.”
Inside the West Wing, aides focused primarily on fast-tracking a final slate of policy priorities by January, including allocating billions of dollars in technology and infrastructure investments and strengthening regulations designed to further protect consumers from bad corporate actors.
Senior White House officials have also spent much of their time managing the country’s foreign entanglements in Ukraine and the Middle East, which they worry will take both conflicts in sharply different directions. The effort reflects a central agenda Biden laid out shortly after the election and has consumed much of his time in the weeks since, aides said.
In the process, Biden aides sought to more clearly document the administration’s accomplishments in statements, fact sheets and video clips. It’s partly a legacy project for historians that could add to Biden’s presidential library in the years to come. But the hope is that it will give Trump-era Democrats easy reference points to remind voters of what life was like under Trump and compare it to how key measures like inflation and health care coverage have changed since then.
Still, Biden officials and allies acknowledged that the president has been conspicuously absent from the broader public discourse, particularly as the rest of the Democratic Party debates how best to resist Trump and rebuild the party.
Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran and former senior adviser to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, said Biden’s silence “is just reading the room.”
“If his speech doesn’t serve any real strategic purpose, there’s no real point in doing it,” he said.
Biden dodged questions on the campaign trail about what went wrong and where Democrats should go from here, and made no substantive public comments about whether he believes American democracy is still at risk with Trump in power. Few expect him to endorse a candidate who could go a long way toward determining the party’s direction in the crowded race for DNC chair, although a Biden adviser said he has been contacted by several people who are running or considering running for DNC chair. the president’s views.
The aide said Biden still plays an important role in discussions about the future of the party, a topic of conversation at a recent dinner he hosted with Democratic operatives Minion Moore, Donna Brazile, Leah Daughtry, Yolanda Caraway and Tina Flournoy. Close to the Harris campaign.
“Usually during the so-called transition phase, the president and vice president thank the team, thank the staff, help pay off debts. This does not look like an incoming president who will play a more strategic role in determining the future of the party,” former DNC chair Brazile said.
But Biden’s general attitude has left a sour taste in the mouths of some party members who feel that supporters who have been knocking on doors, donating money and supporting his administration deserve to hear from the president before he leaves office.
“Whether people agree with it or not, it’s just his strategy: kind of keeping his head down,” said Mike Ceraso, a member of the campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. “I think both he and President Obama saw the transition as trying to make noise or undermine the incoming administration.”
Some Democrats also believe that, even as the president has weakened politically, Biden still has an important public role to play in his last few weeks in office.
“It would be great to talk about the work done under Biden and the many things we’ve done for the country on infrastructure, clean air, clean water, climate,” said Annie Kuster (DN.H.). “We didn’t get that message across strongly enough before the election, but he shouldn’t miss the opportunity to talk about it now.”
Biden is expected to make at least a few high-profile appearances in the coming weeks after a first month after the election that has been devoted to long-planned trips abroad.
