Politics
Inside Joe Biden’s post-presidency
For more than five decades, Joe Biden’s existence was not only incredibly public but busy — his waking hours spent surrounded by a coterie of devoted aides and strategists, his calendar filled with speaking engagements and meetings, his home a bustling and buzzing swarm of activity.
In “What It Takes,” Richard Ben Cramer’s magnum opus on the candidates who sought the presidency in 1988, he captures the scene in the Biden household on the eve of his campaign announcement: “there were typists upstairs, waiting, and gurus present for consultations, and Joe’s parents were over, just to help out … there were a hundred media calls and a million staff and volunteer calls and VIP arrangements — train passes and hotel rooms, Wilmington cops, and state cops and Amtrak cops, the height of the podium (wrong, of course), money bigs with suggestions, food for the staff, people at the airport, people called and said ‘Is Joe there?’”
Ultimately, Biden had what it took to win the presidency.
Now, he’s on the other side of the mountain. And his life has entered a new phase that is quieter and smaller.
He’s staffed by only one or two aides and a small Secret Service detail. He holes up for hours at a time in Delaware working on his memoir with a new ghostwriter, while undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He flies commercial, an aide tells Blue Light News, with little of the luxury or exclusivity that is often associated with former heads of state.
He’s still Amtrak Joe. But he’s also American Airlines Joe.
“He’s very in the wild,” a person familiar with Biden’s comings and goings told Blue Light News. “His footprint is significantly smaller, and it’s sort of shocking.”
In quiet moments outside the Beltway, Biden is often greeted warmly by passersby offering handshakes.
But in Washington, his closest and most loyal advisers sit for closed-door depositions and transcribed interviews on the alleged “cover-up” of his decline and his use of an autopen as president. And as his own party’s still-developing 2028 primary bursts at the seams, Biden’s presidency is still something of a millstone around its neck.
That’s the split screen Biden steps into Thursday night, when he speaks at the closing gala of the National Bar Association’s Centennial Convention in Chicago. His remarks will center on “the progress we’ve made, and the important work that remains to further the cause of justice in America,” a person familiar tells Blue Light News.
Biden’s post-presidency is already striking. His memoir sold for $10 million — a major sum, but tens of millions less than Barack Obama’s. At least one report has suggested he may be struggling to raise money for his presidential library, though a spokesperson described this characterization to Blue Light News as “unfair.” This June, in San Diego, he spoke to SHRM25, a conference of human resource managers, telling them “thanks to you, the people in your workplace feel secure and respected. I think you underestimate what you do.”
In official Washington, there is little such expression of appreciation for the former president.
The former president still casts a long shadow over his party. In recent days, his former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to answer for whether he said all he knew about Biden’s cognition in office. (“I told the truth, which is that he was old,” Buttigieg told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “You could see that he was old.”) And had his former Vice President Kamala Harris actually run for California governor, the NYT noted, she would “have faced difficult questions about how much she knew about President Biden’s decline and whether she participated in shielding his diminished health from the public.”
Hours before Biden speaks in Chicago, Mike Donilon, his trusted aide of some four decades, will go behind closed doors to offer transcribed testimony for the House Oversight Committee.
That comes one day after former Biden aide Steve Ricchetti’s hourslong testimony in which he attacked Republicans’ “efforts to taint President Biden’s legacy with baseless assertions about President Biden’s mental health,” calling them “an obvious attempt to deflect from the chaos of this Administration’s first six months.”
Oversight Republicans were unfazed by the Biden aide’s accusation. In an appearance last night on Fox News, Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) turned the focus back to Biden world’s insistence that the former president hadn’t experienced cognitive decline. “It’s almost like they’re a cult,” Comer said.
Biden, a son of the Senate who is respectful of congressional authority, has kept himself at a remove from the Oversight proceedings and the former aides who are testifying, receiving briefings from lawyers and aides after each session, two people familiar with Biden’s thinking told Blue Light News.
“He’s really keeping himself at a distance — deliberately and intentionally — because he honors the oversight process,” one of those people said.
A Republican source familiar disputed this, telling Blue Light News that during Wednesday’s transcribed interview, Ricchetti stated he had recent conversations with Biden regarding his legal strategy before the transcribed interview.
A person close to the Biden side outside the investigation said “being updated and being kept abreast on the investigations is far from being involved or putting pressure for a specific tactic for former staff.”
Still, Biden’s orbit views the Oversight Committee’s efforts as not having rated in the news cycle.
“It really hasn’t been meaningfully breaking through for a wide array of reasons,” said the first person familiar with Biden’s thinking. “They’re more or less trying to make the damning case that Joe Biden is and was old in office. … Everybody that has been interviewed knows there is no smoking gun. Everything that happened or didn’t happen was reported in the books. The reputational damage to some folks was already baked in, and there’s nothing new.”
A spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee disputed this. “Americans have witnessed President Biden’s cognitive decline with their own eyes, yet his inner circle continues to claim that everything is fine,” Jessica Collins told Blue Light News. “The American people see through these denials, especially now, as President Biden’s doctor and some of his closest aides are pleading the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination. The Oversight Committee is currently conducting a thorough investigation to gather information through depositions and transcribed interviews, and will release a report of its findings upon conclusion.”
Biden’s allies have also sometimes grimaced at his son Hunter Biden’s recent incursion into the news cycle, as when he sat down for more than three hours with Channel 5, went on an expletive-laden tear and suggested that his father’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024 was attributable to Ambien.
Was Hunter acting as his father’s anger translator, saying what the elder Biden wishes he could say but can’t?
“He probably thinks he is and thinks he is doing what is best and defending his father,” a former Biden White House official told Blue Light News. “But it’s not helpful.”
A storm of clinical and critical tell-all books mostly behind him, Biden is now regularly writing his own book, according to an aide.
But he’s not doing it with Mark Zwonitzer, the writer who helped Biden with 2007’s “Promises to Keep” and 2017’s “Promise Me, Dad,” and decades earlier worked as a research assistant on Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes.” A Biden Foundation spokesperson declined to say who was helping him craft his memoir this time around.
Biden’s smaller entourage now often includes just Annie Tomasini, Biden Foundation spokesperson Kelly Scully and a Secret Service detail.
That smaller footprint allows for some genuinely unscripted moments, members of Biden’s team tell Blue Light News. While waiting for flights at major airports, he has posed for photos with other passengers and took the time to handwrite an encouraging note to a Boy Scout during one such interlude in Philadelphia.
Last month, at a Juneteenth celebration at the Reedy Chapel-AME Church in Galveston, Texas, the president who made it an official federal holiday celebrated with congregants, lingering for hours — doing a photo line, speaking with church leadership.
“We were there for three, four hours — it was a long program. And he wanted to stay,” a person traveling with him said. “Anyone who wanted to talk to him had the opportunity to talk to him.” Biden and his small entourage didn’t arrive back at their hotel, the Marriott Marquis in Houston, until after 11 p.m.
All of it recalls that vivid scene in Cramer’s book — the swirl of activity around Biden, the typists upstairs and the gurus present for consultations, the money bigs with suggestions and the people who called and asked “Is Joe there?”
The answer is yes. Joe is still here. But fewer people are around him now, and it’s far closer to the end of a political life than the beginning of one.
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CONCORD, New Hampshire— Pete Buttigieg is barnstorming the nation in the final weeks before the midterms, boosting candidates in battlegrounds and even areas traditionally hostile to Democrats. And it’s helping him look beyond November.
Down the homestretch, Buttigieg is set to campaign in at least six states: North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia and Nevada, along with his adopted home state of Michigan, according to an itinerary shared first with Playbook by a spokesperson for Win the Era, his political group.
Buttigieg has been refining his campaign trail message as he crisscrosses the country, connecting concrete cost-of-living concerns to the more abstract need for political reform.
It’s a kind of real-world testing that helps him further define his political brand at the same time that he leverages it to “be useful,” as he so often puts it, to his party.
“I have a lot of conviction that, actually, your economic message only has credibility if you have a reform message, too,” Buttigieg said in an interview after a Rochester Opera House rally where he received a standing ovation. “Because otherwise, what you’re doing is you’re saying things that people agree with, which is great, but they might not believe that you can actually deliver it.”
He’s also building the kinds of relationships with voters and party leaders that can be useful if he runs for president in 2028, a question he was repeatedly asked. (“We’ll see,” he told one woman at the Deerfield Fair.)
“For Pete, it’s less about getting credit nationally for what he’s done for Democrats and more about building relationships in places that will be beneficial down the line,” said David Axelrod, a Buttigieg confidant.
Buttigieg’s status as an in-demand surrogate was on full display during his 48-hour swing through the Granite State, where he finished “a very, very, very close second place” to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2020 primary, as Buttigieg put it in Saturday evening remarks at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner in Concord.
“I couldn’t ask for a better wingman,” Rep. Chris Pappas said, introducing Buttigieg at the packed rally Friday in Rochester. “People know that he’s a trusted voice,” Stefany Shaheen, who is running for Pappas’ seat, told Blue Light News after campaigning at a book store, cafe and candy shop with Buttigieg along Elm Street in Manchester.
How Buttigieg is learning from the midterms
Buttigieg has neither a battleground governorship nor a personal fortune to wire into midterm races. What he has put on offer is himself: He’s made more than 100 endorsements this cycle, campaigning in person for roughly half of them, and stops in 37 states since he left the Transportation Department.
Buttigieg was welcomed in places where candidates shunned some of his potential rivals. He campaigned with Rob Sand and Josh Turek in Iowa as they run for governor and senator, respectively. He backed Brandon Dukes in his special election effort to flip a Pennsylvania state House seat that Trump won by 18 points. He was alone among his peers in endorsing Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin in his victory over longtime Rep. John Larson in Connecticut.
“If I can help give voice to what people are after in diverse geographies, including very conservative areas,” he said, “turns out that’s my best use of time.”
Buttigieg admitted he wasn’t certain what role he would play in the party’s midterms at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. Now he’s processing all of the data and inputs he’s receiving along his travels.
“I’m learning a lot about our country and our party as I go, and what I’m seeing is that people have a real hunger for change,” he told Blue Light News. “First of all, in policy. Secondly, in the kind of politics that we have, and third, in the system itself.”
That’s developed into a core argument in his speeches connecting the cost of living to political reform: “If we want the kitchen table to be better off, we got to deal with the political system that is kicking the legs out from under the kitchen table,” Buttigieg said at the Rochester Opera House Friday evening.
It’s a message that can last long beyond the midterms, and Buttigieg is trying to point his party there.
“Part of what I’m really trying to push my party on is the need to have answers for ‘then what,’” he said. “There’s a big ‘then what’ for when Donald Trump leaves the political scene, but there’s an immediate ‘then what’ starting on Nov. 4.”
A Democratic Congress, he argued, needs “a compelling governing vision coming out of the gate” and should move quickly on tariffs, the minimum wage, tax fairness, health care, the Child Tax Credit and political reforms including gerrymandering.
The 2028 question
Even as he sidestepped several questions from reporters about his next moves, saying he was focused on 2026, remnants of his 2020 campaign and hints of a future one piled up. People wore “Pete for New Hampshire” buttons and T-shirts. His old playlist, including Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Up Around the Bend,” played at the Friday night rally.
At the Roosevelt dinner the next night, in front of a sold-out crowd of over 400, Buttigieg earned a standing ovation that ended in “Pete, Pete, Pete” chants.
“Pete had a great New Hampshire organization in 2020, nearly winning,” Ray Buckley, the chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, told Blue Light News. “If anything, his popularity here has grown.”
Much has changed since then.
On Saturday evening, instead of walking out to Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes,” his ubiquitous anthem back then, or even Imagine Dragons’ “It’s Time,” which he road-tested last year, Buttigieg employed “You Get What You Give” by the New Radicals.
There have been deeper changes, too: Buttigieg is now the father of 5-year-old twins, Gus and Penelope. He is weighing whether he can run for president and remain a good and present father.
His husband, Chasten, is a “great dad” and “knows why I’m on the road.”
Back on the road, Buttigieg is winning over those who didn’t back him in 2020.
At the back of the room in Rochester on Friday night, the town’s Mayor Chuck Grassie wore a “Pete for New Hampshire” button as he took in the scene. Grassie, who backed Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2020 and considers himself a “pragmatic progressive,” said Buttigieg could knit together the party’s moderate and progressive factions.
“He’s a guy I think would attract a lot of people,” Grassie said. “And a lot of people I talk to are saying, ‘You know, he’s looking better and better every day.’”
Added Grassie: “In New Hampshire, I think Pete may be the guy to beat.”
Sen. Ted Cruz fired back at JD Vance for suggesting he’s already focused on a 2028 presidential bid, calling the vice president “insecure” while insisting he’s focused on the 2026 midterms.
“In my experience, people engage in political bomb-throwing when they’re feeling insecure,” Cruz said in a phone interview Saturday. “So he’s welcome to make whatever comments he likes. I’m going to keep focusing on the midterms and helping us win on Election Day in the next 30 days.”
Cruz’s comments came in response to an NBC News interview Thursday with Vance in which the vice president suggested Cruz was prematurely eyeing a White House run.
“It is really obvious to me that, at this very moment, Ted Cruz is running for president,” Vance said. “At this moment, I’m not. I’m trying to help elect Republicans. That’s what I’m going to keep on doing.”
Vance is widely viewed as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, but Cruz has said he doesn’t believe Vance is the sure-fire nominee and suggested he might throw his own hat in the ring. “I’ll certainly be part of the discussion,” he told MS NOW in August.
On Saturday, Cruz told Blue Light News he is dedicated to helping Republicans maintain control of both chambers of Congress. He pointed to his travel this cycle to campaign with candidates in Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, South Carolina as well as in his home state of Texas as proof. He also said he has trips planned this month to campaign with Republicans in Alaska, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina.
“Over the last 10 years, there’s no Republican in the country who has campaigned for more Senate candidates, more House candidates, more gubernatorial candidates than I have, and this year will be no exception,” he said.
Cruz rattled off a list of a dozen GOP candidates he’s helped bolster in past years, including former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, U.S. House candidate Karoline Leavitt — and the vice president.
“Indeed, ironically, I spent a full day on the road with JD Vance, campaigning with him when he was running for Senate in Ohio [in 2022],” Cruz said. “I was very glad he won that race. I was very glad to help him.”
A spokesperson for Vance did not immediately respond to Cruz’s latest comments.
Vance campaigned in Texas and Florida this week and will hold a rally in Alaska on Monday.
Republicans have tried to find a new boogeyman this year as they rail against Democratic socialism and the “radical” left: Zohran Mamdani. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie Sanders.
Still more mentioned than all of them, at least in campaign ads: former President Joe Biden.
A Blue Light News review of hundreds of ads running in battleground House and Senate races in recent months shows Republicans largely haven’t seized on progressive icons in paid media. Instead, Biden is the Democrat most likely to be mentioned in GOP ads this cycle, coming up across dozens of races.
President Donald Trump has frequently sought to blame Biden for high prices and other challenges that his administration has faced. Even so, the former president has become a far less useful punching bag for Republicans since leaving office and remaining largely out of the spotlight: At this time in the 2024 cycle, Biden had been mentioned in more than 1,000 Republican House and Senate ads, according to AdImpact data.
The data illustrates how Republicans have been unable to land on a clear villain as they seek to convince voters that Democratic control of Congress would be worse than keeping the GOP in charge. Their warnings about old establishment figures like Biden and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi don’t land like they once did. But they also haven’t been able to seize on emerging democratic socialists like they had hoped to.
Democrats’ foil, meanwhile, has never been more obvious, with Trump’s approval rating in the mid-thirties amid continued high prices and the Iran war.
“No one will match the level of Pelosi for Republicans, in part because the Obamacare vote was such a touchstone moment. And the ‘we have to pass it to find out what’s in it,’” said Doug Heye, a longtime Republican operative who noted he still has “Fire Pelosi” swag from the Republicans’ successful 2010 midterm rout. The then-speaker was central to the GOP’s campaign message that year.
Part of the challenge for Republicans comes from Democrats’ lack of a clear leader. Pelosi stepped down from Democratic leadership at the start of 2023, and her successor, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) does not elicit the same animus from Republicans. In the 2022 cycle, her last term as Democratic leader, Pelosi was invoked in more than 80 GOP ads, Blue Light News’s analysis found. Now, she’s mentioned just a handful of times, while Jeffries hasn’t been mentioned in any battleground TV ads this year, according to the Blue Light News review of transcripts.
Biden was an easy target for the GOP in 2022 and 2024, when Republicans blamed him for high inflation and the cost of living. Now, poll after poll shows that voters are more likely to hold Trump — not Biden — responsible for the current state of the U.S. economy, even as Trump tries to redirect the blame.
Even Kamala Harris, the most recent Democratic standard-bearer as their 2024 nominee, is named less often in paid media this cycle than Biden. And among other potential future Democratic presidential candidates, only California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez appear as Republican foils — and not as often as Harris or Biden.
Ocasio-Cortez is often mentioned by Republicans in the same sentence as Sanders, especially when the GOP seeks to tie Democrats in battleground races to the party’s progressive wing. In Michigan’s hotly contested Senate race, former public health official Abdul El-Sayed was endorsed by both — something his opponent Mike Rogers and GOP outside groups have seized on.
“El Sayed is endorsed by extreme liberals like AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders,” one recent ad from the conservative super PAC Sentinel Action Fund says.
Some Republicans have sought to run against the progressives even when there are no such ties: One ad that ran earlier this year from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP comptroller promised to stand up to Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and the “new radical left.” Neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed in either race.
Most often, the GOP has run ads seeking to tie Democratic candidates to socialism or communism — the concepts themselves — in dozens of House battleground races and nearly every major Senate race. Just this week, the Trump administration launched a national $20 million DHS-funded campaign-style ad spree that features Trump lambasting “communism, socialism, and Marxism.”
But when it comes to specific political figures — like Mamdani, New York City’s mayor — it gets complicated. Republicans once salivated at the prospect of Mamdani as a foil when he was first elected last year. But his first year in office has largely boosted his standing with voters, complicating efforts to turn his tenure into a negative for Democrats.
Trump’s surprising continued embrace of the New York City mayor — just last week, the president stood by Mamdani and said he hoped he would “be a great mayor” — has further complicated GOP efforts to paint him as a villain.
In a handful of swingy New York congressional districts, Republicans have still attempted to tie their opponents to Mamdani, while Democrats have pushed back on the connection. In New York’s 21st District, which Trump won by more than 20 points two years ago, Democratic dairy farmer Blake Gendebien ran an ad arguing that his Republican opponent wants voters to think he’s “running against Zohran Mamdani” but “that’s a load of bull.”
The GOP has characterized prominent Democrats as socialist for decades. As progressives won a series of contested primaries this year, some Democrats worried the rise of figures with ties to the Democratic Socialists of America would give Republicans easy ammunition for the general election.
But being called a “socialist” may not have the same shock value it once did.
“I don’t think just calling a candidate ‘socialist’ works that well for Republicans, particularly this late in the game,” said Matt Towery, a longtime GOP pollster. “If a candidate focuses on parts of the DSA’s platform and can authentically pin it on their opponent, that might work. But Republicans just assume people have a bad reaction to the term socialist, and the term doesn’t elicit the same reaction it used to.”
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