Joe Biden’s increasing bouts of invisibility sows concern about who is making critical decisions

Since announcing six weeks ago that he would not be running for office, President Joe Biden has made just three public appearances. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/AFP

The President is Missing, a 2018 thriller, was the title of Bill Clinton’s first attempt at fiction. Readers who recall the man’s facility with fabrications, such as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, may object to that description, noting that his capacity for invention was famous long before he took up the novelist’s pen.

But we are talking here of fiction in the formal, hardback-bound, bestseller list-topping sense, “co-authored” with a celebrity producer of mass-market thrillers, James Patterson.

The plot involved assassination attempts, sundry terrorists and a cyberthreat to paralyse the world, and it revolved around the central absurdity that the president of the United States could somehow disappear from public view for weeks.

But “the president is missing” is now more or less a non-fictional description of the current condition of the world’s biggest superpower.

Since announcing six weeks ago that he would not, after all, be running for another four years in office, President Biden has essentially gone to ground. He has made three public appearances, the last of which was at the Democratic National Convention nearly two weeks ago when he gave a late-night valedictory before crocodile-tearful delegates.

He spent the next week on holiday at the house of a wealthy friend in California before returning to the east coast, where he promptly repaired to his beach house in Delaware for another week of WFH.

At least that’s what the official White House record shows. Actually locating him is like trying to find someone in the witness protection program. There have been occasional sightings of an elderly man sunning himself on a beach and attending the local Catholic Church. The White House press pool, bored out of its mind, continues to dutifully file daily reports that say essentially “Nothing happened today” and dream of being reassigned to cover something more exciting, like the weather.

Joe Biden with Kamala Harris and family members at his last public appearance, at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered the keynote address.

If you go to the White House website, you will see a list of almost daily “Statements from the President” on everything from measures to tackle obesity to congratulatory messages to Ukrainians on their national independence day to summaries of phone calls with foreign leaders. But these are as likely to have been written by the president as the signature on those tens of thousands of White House Christmas cards “he” sends out every year.

It’s easy to make fun of the disappearing president and no one would begrudge the 81-year-old a little downtime, especially after the stress of having had his job taken away from him by his so-called friends.

But there are serious issues at stake and the increasing duration of his periods of invisibility sows growing doubts about whether he is actually performing his functions – and if he isn’t, then just who exactly is making the critical decisions?

Biden still has five more months (almost one eighth) of his presidential term to serve out. The world is a churning mess. US forces are on alert in the Middle East as the war between Israel and its enemies rages on. American-made weapons are being unleashed by Ukrainians with lethal force against Russians on Russian soil. In the Pacific, tensions continue over China’s strategic ambitions and the effort of the US and its allies to contain them.

His key aides are busy as usual – the national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in Beijing on Thursday trying to calm relations with China, the secretary of state Antony Blinken continues his frantic shuttle diplomacy around the Middle East – but confidence that they are instruments of strategy rather than independent actors making policy on the fly is diminishing with Biden’s evident deterioration.

There was always an awkward tension between Biden’s acknowledgment that he was unable to serve four more years and the White House insistence that he would absolutely be on top of his game for the next six months. When he quit the presidential race there were calls that he should quit the presidency too, and hand over to his vice-president, now the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

But just as the decision to get him to stand down was driven by electoral considerations rather than any concern for the national interest, so too is the decision that he should stay in office in his semi-catatonic state.

Harris has evidently decided her best chance of winning in November is to campaign by placing as much distance as she reasonably can between herself and the unpopular administration of which she has been a member. Since nobody really thinks the vice-president does very much, she might just get away with it.

But if she were actually to move into the Oval Office before the election, it would be much harder for her to make that distinction – and much more likely the public would hold her accountable for what they see as the mess the country is in.

So Biden must soldier on – embittered, apparently; resentful, understandably; but evidently now reduced to doing as little work as possible in the face of his rapidly waning faculties.

Aside from the legitimate questions Americans have about who exactly is leading them in perilous times, there is more than a touch of pathos about all this. Biden has been in public life for more than half a century.

After being the perennial nearly man – two unsuccessful presidential runs and then the vice-presidency – he finally reached the pinnacle late in life in conditions of national crisis.

He had good reason to believe his career would be capped off in improbable glory. Instead the sun is going down on a man propelled into obscurity far sooner than any president in history, even as he still formally holds the office; his presence on the global stage already a wraith.

The Times