Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s aides did not want him to speak with me.
For months, as I worked on a book about the 2024 presidential election, I made multiple requests for an interview with Mr. Biden. One of my co-authors had sat down with President-elect Donald J. Trump, and we felt it was critical to talk to Mr. Biden. But the former president’s aides said he was working on a memoir, and that would conflict with my book.
Yet when I reached Mr. Biden on his cellphone in late March, he answered and agreed to talk. He broke his silence on his successor to criticize the early weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. “I don’t see anything he’s done that’s been productive,” the former president said.
When I asked if he had any regrets about dropping out of the presidential race, Mr. Biden said, in a detached tone, “No, not now. I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets.” Then he hung up because he was boarding an Amtrak train.
My brief conversation with Mr. Biden prompted a cascade of concern among his top aides. One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. Others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden’s phone number.
Mr. Biden had seemed open to continuing the conversation, but my subsequent calls went straight to voice mail. His automated greeting simply said, “Joe.”
Two days later, that greeting was replaced by a message from Verizon Wireless: “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected or is no longer in service.”
The swift reaction to my call reflects the insularity that became a defining feature of the final stages of Mr. Biden’s political career. And in no instance was the protectiveness of his staff, and his failure to connect with outside voices, more pronounced than in the period after his disastrous debate performance 13 months ago. At the most perilous moment of his presidency, with his prospects for re-election teetering amid growing concerns about his age and mental acuity, Mr. Biden was all but impossible for anyone outside his tight inner circle to reach.
Instead of confronting the president with the bad news, his aides limited access to him, making it difficult for even some of his longtime friends and allies in Congress to reach him, including Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware and a close ally.
Mr. Biden’s aides never had him meet with his campaign’s pollsters. Instead, they often presented overly optimistic outlooks of the political landscape, alarming members of the campaign staff, who looked for ways to bypass his longtime advisers Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon to get information to the president. For the most part, they failed to reach him.
This account of Mr. Biden’s tight inner circle is based on a new book, “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” which I wrote with Josh Dawsey of The Wall Street Journal and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post. Taken together, details from that period help explain why it took Mr. Biden so long — 24 days — to come to the conclusion that his candidacy was finished.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden declined to comment.
‘Do you realize how bad it is?’
Democrats were in a panic.
Nearly two weeks after Mr. Biden had melted down on national television during a debate with Mr. Trump, some members of his party feared he was certain to lose the presidential race — and that he might take them down with him.
Representative Pete Aguilar of California, a top House Democrat, called one of the only people who had the president’s ear.
“Do you realize how bad it is?” Mr. Aguilar asked Mr. Ricchetti early last July. “Has anyone told the president how bad it is?”
Mr. Ricchetti was sanguine. They knew some people felt that way, he said.
Mr. Aguilar shot back, “Steve, has anyone walked into the Oval and told him we could lose everything?”
Mr. Ricchetti said no, insisting that many members of Congress still supported the president. Mr. Aguilar said that was simply not true. The men proceeded to argue, shouting at times, for nearly an hour as the congressman tried to convey the desperation in the party.
Mr. Biden was aware of the concern among Democrats — it was impossible to ignore — but his aides continued to provide him with a warped version of reality.
No path to victory
Mr. Biden had a team of campaign pollsters who were prepared to tell him the truth about the numbers, but they never got the opportunity. They were told they should present to his closest advisers — not to the president himself.
The team already felt hamstrung, because they had not been given access to internal campaign analytics after the debate.
So they focused on public polling for their presentation. Citing data from RealClearPolitics, an aggregator of public polls, the team walked the advisers through each of the battleground states. Mr. Biden trailed Mr. Trump in all of them, though more significantly in the Sun Belt states than in the Blue Wall. More troubling was that reliably Democratic states, including Virginia, Minnesota and New Mexico, now appeared to be competitive. Given scant public polling of those states, the pollsters also had to rely on data from other clients’ private polling to bolster their case.
The pollsters tried to be as polite as possible, but their conclusion was damning: Their research found that Mr. Biden was just not able to persuade voters that he was up for the job. The president had no path to victory.
Two days after the presentation, Geoff Garin, one of the pollsters, checked in with Mr. Ricchetti. Mr. Ricchetti lit into him and said the presentation was out of line. It was not their job to tell them there was no path to victory. The pollsters, Mr. Ricchetti said, were supposed to provide the path to win.
If Mr. Biden knew about the tanking polls, he did not let on.
When former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, met privately with Mr. Biden in the White House for a crisis meeting that July, she grew frustrated by his insistence that the polling showed no real change since the debate. Was he not seeing the numbers she was seeing?
At one point, Mr. Biden asked an aide to put Mr. Donilon on the phone because the president did not believe Ms. Pelosi. She was adamant the polls showed Mr. Biden would lose to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Donilon got on the line and said he disagreed.
‘Keeping him in a bubble’
Adrienne Elrod, a Biden campaign adviser, suspected the president was not getting a complete picture of how dire the situation was.
She was among several senior staff members who wanted the president to see the data they were seeing, but they never had direct access to him. They blamed Mr. Ricchetti and Mr. Donilon. So they went to two people they knew could get Mr. Biden’s attention: the hosts of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, which the president watched every morning.
Ms. Elrod was close to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski from her years appearing on their show before joining the campaign. Ms. Elrod called Mr. Scarborough to discuss the polling and concerns inside the campaign that the president was being kept in the dark, in the hopes that he would convey those points on the show.
Days before Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, Mr. Scarborough channeled those frustrations when he said on the air. “The anger that I hear is not at Joe Biden,” Mr. Scarborough said. “The anger I hear are the people who are keeping him in a bubble.”
There were opportunities for Mr. Biden to hear the truth, but for the most part the people around him kept the news rose-colored.
On his way to a fund-raising swing in the Hamptons soon after the debate, Mr. Biden asked his coterie of traveling aides on Air Force One about what the outside world was saying. They gave an overly generous picture of his standing, tiptoeing around the fact that the Democratic Party was tearing itself apart. Some who overheard the conversation panicked, worried that Mr. Biden was hearing only a sanitized version of the situation. Still, no one said anything.
But later that day, Mr. Biden did get a flash of reality.
In East Hampton, N.Y., he met with fewer than a dozen high-dollar supporters at the home of the businessman Avram Glazer. The donors challenged Mr. Biden on his debate performance. One donor told him they were close in age, and he conceded he was not as smart or sharp as he once was. He told Mr. Biden to persuade him that he was still able to perform the job for another four years. Other donors piled on.
Mr. Biden dismissed the debate performance as one bad night, vowing to stay in the race. His closest aides would brush off the concern as typical donor anxiety.
In the months since Mr. Trump took office, many Democrats have expressed regret that they did not call for Mr. Biden to drop out sooner — or push him to not run for re-election at all. The former president’s closest aides maintain a different view. He should have never given into pressure and abandoned his re-election campaign, they argue.
“It was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership,” Mr. Donilon said in an interview for this book. “Tell me why you walked away from a guy with 81 million votes.”
He added: “The only one who has run ahead among seniors. A native of Pennsylvania. Why do that?”
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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