Mike Donilon is the brains behind Joe Biden

Joe Biden has known Mike Donilon for 40 years and insiders say the former pollster seems to know the US President better than he knows himself.

Tom Donilon is the last person to review every speech or presidential communication before it hits Joe Biden’s desk.

In the almost daily gathering of Joe Biden’s West Wing brains trust, the five words most commonly uttered by the US President are “Mike, what do you think?”

Biden has known Mike Donilon for 40 years and insiders say the former pollster, a Catholic who grew up in a large East Coast family with Irish roots, just like his boss, seems to know the President better than he knows himself.

The inner circle that is powering Biden’s busy output all go far back with him. It includes three men who served as his chief-of-staff when he was vice-president: Ron Klain, now the presidential chief-of-staff; Bruce Reed, deputy chief-of-staff; and Steve Ricchetti, counsellor to the president. Others who usually complete the line-up to discuss the pressing issues of the day with Biden are Anita Dunn, senior adviser and a former White House communications director under Barack Obama, and Cedric Richmond, director of the White House office of public engagement.

Joe Biden at the Sportrock Climbing Centres in Alexandria, Virginia, over the weekend. Picture: AFP

But it is Donilon, the last person to review every speech or presidential communication before it hits Biden’s desk, to whom Biden turns to clarify his own thoughts.

“He is the closest to an alter ego Biden has and certainly the most trusted and influential,” a West Wing insider said.

This source, who experienced the Obama West Wing and similar top-level huddles, added that Donilon appeared to help Biden to be more decisive. “(Biden) is like Obama in that he wants to hear the room out but he’s more assertive at the end of the meeting about what his view is, not as sphinx-like as Obama.”

Ron Klain. Picture: AFP

This helps to account for the pace of activity in the Biden White House, which has produced more executive orders and actions — 106 — than his three predecessors combined.

It is a common accusation from the Republicans that Biden is a pawn of shadowy puppeteers but the truth is closer to executive government by a coterie of confidants, all with offices within a few paces of the Oval Office and most of them in the “corridor of power” leading from there to Klain’s door.

Entry to this club generally requires decades of face time. Donilon, who is thought to be 62, and Klain, 59, were at Georgetown university in Washington DC together in the early 1980s, while the three former chiefs-of-staff are fixtures of Obama and Biden campaigns and administrations.

Klain was an intern in Biden’s Senate office. Ricchetti got to know Biden in the early Nineties while serving as President Bill Clinton’s liaison with the Senate. Reed, 61, as director of Clinton’s domestic policy council, helped Biden to draft and pass the 1994 Crime Bill.

Anita Dunn

Klain told the Boston Globe that Donilon was “our White House wise man”.

“Mike, I think, understands why Joe Biden ran for president, what Joe Biden wants to do, and helps make sure that our work here stays on that mission,” he added.

It was Donilon whom Biden called first in 2017 after the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, reignited his presidential ambitions.

Donilon, as chief strategist of Biden’s presidential campaign, steered away from a bare knuckle fight with president Donald Trump and counselled his boss to stay above the 24/7 news fray, insisting that “Twitter’s not the electorate”.

In the face of Trump’s jibes about “Sleepy Joe”, Donilon stuck to his belief that Americans wanted a calmer, less intrusive leader. Several weeks into the administration, against media demands for answers on policy positions, Donilon reminded the inner circle why Biden was elected.

“Right now the two big things are beating Covid and getting the economy back on track,” he said, Klain told the Boston Globe.

“We need to stay focused on those and not get distracted by what’s in some Washington newsletter.”

The Times

Left to right, then US president Barack Obama, Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, Bill Daley and Joe Biden in the White House Situation Room in May 2012 before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Picture: The White House