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Members of Joe Biden’s staff are said to be “scared s***less” of him, leading advisors to carefully curate their briefings to ensure they don’t “set him off”, according to a senior official.
Biden’s close-knit group of advisors and spin doctors have worked tirelessly to portray a positive public image for the oldest president in US history.
In his first two years in office, he gave the fewest interviews since Ronald Reagan’s presidency – with critics suggesting that he’s faced fewer moments of public accountability for his comments and actions.
All of that unravelled during Thursday’s debate where the 81-year-old stumbled his way through the first televised debate of the 2024 election against his more coherent Republican rival Donald Trump.
Following his disastrous performance, family members, including First Lady Jill Biden and son Hunter Biden, blamed Biden’s campaign team during a meeting at Camp David on Sunday.
But, behind closed doors, the president is said to be a long way from the softly-spoken, timid man who appeared on stage.
Instead, an anonymous senior administration official told Politico that Biden often unleashes his wrath upon staff, so much so that aides that pull together the president’s formal briefings are known to tiptoe around topics that could spark red-hot fury from him during meetings.
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” they said.
“Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him,” the official continued.
Sources also told the outlet that Biden almost exclusively seeks advice from a handful of senior aides, with his inner circle growing increasingly cliquish as he becomes more difficult to deal with in day-to-day business.
“They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now,” an anonymous Democratic strategist told Politico.
This isn’t the first time that Biden has been accused of losing his temper with staff.
Jeff Connaughton, a former Biden campaign and senate aide, previously wrote in his 2012 book The Payoff that Biden as a senator was an “egomaniacal autocrat... determined to manage his staff through fear”. He wrote that Biden once told him to “get the f*** out of the car” when asked to do some fundraising calls.
Ted Kaufman, Biden's longtime chief of staff when he represented Delaware in the Senate, contested that the president’s approach brings the best out of his aides.
“If there is something that's not in the brief, he's going to find it,” Kaufmman told Axios last year.
“It's not to embarrass people, it's because he wants to get to the right decision. Most people who have worked for him like the fact that he challenges them and gets them to a better decision,” he added.
Following last week’s debate, top Democratic donor, John Morgan, publicly called out and demanded the resignation of three of Biden’s senior staff: Ron Klain, Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer.
“[Biden’s] advisers failed him,” he wrote on X on Sunday. “Format was a disaster for him and a plus for Trump. He over practiced and was drained… who wouldn’t be.”
Biden, however, refuted that the trio were at fault, according to another source close with the matter.
