In the rush to know everything about Joe Biden’s road to or away from the White House, we may be forgetting what it is we actually know, and what it likely means: the dramatic recurrence of an insider play we have seen many times before.
On Thursday before last, the president of the United States had what was deemed the worst debate performance of a presidential contender in history. On Friday and Saturday, supportive messages came from politicos, including President Obama, whereas a series of pleas to drop out of the race came from establishment journalists. On Monday through Thursday, as reports came out that the president was determined to continue in the race, lesser known House Democrats went on record opposing his candidacy, and prominent Democrats sounded cautionary notes.
Meantime, The Washington Post reported that “former president Barack Obama has privately told allies … a harsher assessment” of Biden’s chances. Polling authorities, op-ed columnists, worried reporters, and respected legal professionals all made or continued to make their anti-Biden voices heard, sometimes multiple times. Democrat donors were reported, a few publicly and many privately, discussing pushing the president to step aside. After last week’s interview of the president, these voices increased in numbers, volume and insistence.
There is always a danger of over-reading a succession of events like this, seeing the twists as preordained by whatever narrative (failing president supported by delusional operators; vulturous overthrowers making an inside play) the reader imports. Still, underlying interests — in power and in status — undeniably shape actions in ways that can make events like these pre-ordained. In this case, the unmentioned connections of key Biden insiders, and the way Democrat donors’ determination to push him off the ticket intersects with the needs of establishment journalists, suggest that that’s what’s happening here.
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The evidence begins with a Washington Post article last week, one of many that aired criticism of members of Biden’s inner circle, chief among them Anita Dunn and her husband Bob Bauer, for mis-preparing Biden for the debate or for shutting out post-debate dissenting voices despite what was now, essentially overnight, described as his dementia. The article ended with a quote by Hilary Rosen, identified as “a longtime Democratic strategist” who criticized what was perceived to be this group’s low-key response to concerns over the president’s debate performance. According to Rosen:
[The Biden operation] would have been better off sticking with honesty. You can’t tell people they didn’t see what they saw. To try to turn this around and try to make it be everybody else’s fault — it’s not only offensive, it just isn’t going to fly.
Rosen, though The Post did not mention this fact, was a decade-long colleague of Dunn’s at her powerhouse Washington public relations-political strategy firm, SKDK (she left on good terms in 2022), as well as a consultant to the Obama White House, where Dunn also served. (Dunn’s husband Bauer, according to The Times last year, “counts two American presidents — Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama — among his clients.”) The Dunn-Rosen relationship raises logical questions. Was Rosen criticizing her longtime colleague or giving her public advice? Why would she do this, as opposed to giving her a call? Or was she pushing an anti-Biden strategy that Dunn, nominally a Biden loyalist, did not necessarily oppose?
Certainly, Dunn has played both sides before. Just one year ago, in 2023, NPR revealed that “Dunn … provided ‘crisis communications’ assistance to Michael Madigan, the then-Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives” over sexual assault claims. She did this even as Alaina Hampton, who was suing Madigan over these claims, “received support in her case from Dunn’s firm.”
Once Hampton found out about this conflict of interest — inadvertently, during an FBI wiretap featured at a trial that was “part of a long-running federal corruption investigation” into Madigan — she began poring through her emails, “trying to determine what information she shared with her contacts at SKDK.” Hampton said she felt “sick” and “betrayed.” Today, Biden’s family apparently blames Dunn for the debate, and one of Biden’s most vocal loyalists is publicly calling her a liar and a grifter.
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Probing deeper into the networks of Dunn and Bauer does not make the questions disappear. Both are walking rolodexes of Washington, and Dunn has become close to seemingly every major centrist Democrat (pro-conglomerate, pro–“free trade,” pro-lobbying) in the city, as well as to several left-leaning liberals who are still reliable party players — including, interestingly, Lloyd Doggett, the first House Democrat to call for Biden to step aside. Overall, she is a handler of the politicos backed by the corporate-nonprofit-administrative interests that have edged out private-sector labor unions and city parties as the main players in the Democrat party.
This closeness has had policy effects. When leftist Democrats frustrated at the Biden White House’s mixed progress on its one genuinely anti-authoritarian priority, antitrust, point to people to blame, it is Anita Dunn at the White House and Lisa Monaco at the Justice Department — longtime corporate operatives now serving a president pushing to rein corporations in.
Other members of the Biden circle are cut from the same cloth. One is Mike Donilon, whose brother, Tom, is the former national security adviser to President Obama and a longtime Obama loyalist. Another, Ron Klain, is a longtime lobbyist and Democrat fixture — always there in a breach, including as Al Gore’s point man in the Florida recount.
These insider Washington players — whose careers depend on their access to party donors and nonprofit leaders, lobbyists, and staffers — are natural endorsers of a loose anti-Biden play, probably with the tacit assent of President Obama, who has taken the nearly unprecedented step of living in Washington, D.C. after his presidency; who reportedly meets regularly with White House aides; who is treated as the de facto president when he visits the White House; and whose wife has notably not campaigned for Biden for unpersuasive reasons aired the day of the debate. The anti-Biden play’s purpose would be to set up, or allow, a president unwilling to hand over power to make a very public fall. This would then lead to a media-generated furor, making his stepping aside seem like the result of his campaign’s mistakes or his decrepitude, not an insider-enabled play.
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A play like this depends on the willing release of damaging information about Biden by establishment media. Inside players are well placed to prime this particular pump because they are aware of Washington journalists’ main concern: like all monopolists, to keep their hold on their product, in this case “factual truth” off inside information.
This concern has meant journalists spending several years pushing or not vocally combating facts from inside sources (donors, politicos, staffers, lobbyists) supporting one narrative (an in-touch Biden as defender of democracy), then working overtime to switch to another (Biden as decrepit threat to world peace) when the interests of these sources change. Meantime, the prosaic reality (Biden as a latter-day Leonid Brezhnev, the gerontocratic Soviet figurehead minded by handlers) has been noted since 2020 in less connected venues from The Guardian to The Tampa Bay Times.
Then, like now, voters in swing states don’t seem to mind if Biden is at the wheel; it’s the policies they care about. But the insider players have other interests in mind — namely, stopping the Democrat antitrust agenda begun under Biden. They also have other ideas about what will win an election: not policies, but personality politics. And the insiders’ journalistic connections amplify these agendas for reasons of their own. Indeed, the function served by the sheer amount of information released this past week is not to inform voters. Instead, the gaudy stories of decrepitude, the spectral photos, and the personal stories of Jill Biden’s class resentment and malevolent influence reinforce for readers the importance of journalists’ lock on insider information, the currency of their realm.
“There are 2 conversations in Washington right now,” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote this Saturday, distilling this approach into a tweet: “The public one is that Biden’s ok. The private one is the same people telling reporters it’s a disaster. Biden fans are blaming reporters but the press is just letting the public in on what’s really being said.” Meanwhile, real information (e.g., Rosen’s or Doggett’s relation to Dunn), which is publicly available and thus not dependent on journalists “letting the public in” via insider connections, goes unmentioned.
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All of this is par for the course for the company town that is modern Washington, D.C., where power is the ultimate commodity and the people who exercise it publicly the ultimate disposables. In the past, public players perceived as uncooperative, threatening, or aged out have seen their reputations destroyed and their personal lives made public — Bill Clinton in the ’90s, Donald Trump in the 2010s, and Dianne Feinstein in the 2020s. Those operators doing the destroying are the real threats to representative government: the people in the institutions who never leave — the minders, and the makers, of the Deep State.
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