“Clearly, his staff has kept him from the usual back and forth with the press,” says Goodstein. “To be sure, he’s had some, but less and less over time. It seems a fair inference that his press contacts have been reduced to avoid gaffes.” Long-time Washington hacks talk of how, as a senator and then vice president, Biden was very happy to shoot the breeze, make himself available for off-the-record chats or to provide a quote. 

One undernoted issue is that the psychodrama about Biden is preventing other senior Democrats from taking the fight to Trump. Partly that’s because they don’t want to be seen as undermining Biden and partly it’s because the White House won’t let them.

“I worry that the core cadre of counsellors around the president continues to try and put roadblocks and constraints in the path of some of our most effective spokespeople,” says Brett Bruen, a former diplomat who worked in the Obama White House. “Part of it seems to stem from a worry that the contrast with the president’s energy and effectiveness on the campaign trail would be put in stark relief.”

Diary management

It has been reported that those who manage the president’s diary try not to schedule early morning events or those in the evening that start after 8pm if at all possible. All presidents have downtime on their foreign trips but Biden appears to require more than most. He arrived in France 24 hours before the recent D-Day anniversary celebrations and spent his whole first day in a Paris hotel. 

The president’s recent dismal debate performance has variously been blamed on a cold, over-preparation and jet lag, despite Biden having returned to the US nearly a full fortnight before his face-off with Trump. Since then, various anecdotes that foreign diplomats and the Washington cognoscenti have been sitting on are starting to bubble to the surface. 

For example, Biden failed to turn up for an evening meeting with Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, in June 2022, according to a report this week in the Wall Street Journal. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, reportedly told attendees the president had to go to bed. However, the White House has since denied he made those remarks.

The president often attends events holding cards with information. Two years ago he read from some scribbled notes on the back of a card he’d been handed by staffers. This allowed the TV cameras present to pick up what was printed on the front. It included instructions such as: “YOU enter the Roosevelt room and say hello to participants… YOU take YOUR seat.”