A reporter’s call with former President Joe Biden earlier this year angered his top aides so much that they aggressively confronted the reporter and then changed Biden’s cell number.
The incident—another instance of the strict gatekeeping of Biden by those close to them—is described by The New York Times’ White House correspondent, Tyler Pager, who called Biden in late March for an interview for his co-authored book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America.
During the call, Pager writes that Biden criticized Donald Trump’s administration—“I don’t see anything he’s done that’s been productive”—and maintained that he didn’t regret dropping out of the 2024 race.
”I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets,” Biden said.
Afterwards, Biden’s aides were furious. “One screamed at me for calling the former president directly,” Pager recalls. Others demanded to know how he knew Biden’s phone number.
Later attempts to reach Biden were unsuccessful, according to Pager. While his initial calls went straight to voicemail, he then received a message from Verizon Wireless saying the number “has been changed, disconnected or is no longer in service.”
Events of this sort played out during the tail end of Biden’s re-election campaign and contributed to the former president waiting until mid-July to abandon it. Pager describes Biden as being surrounded by “yes men” who restricted anyone from reaching him with bad news.
Biden never even met with his campaign’s pollsters, Pager writes. The pollsters instead had to show their findings to Biden’s closest advisers. But when they made clear that they didn’t think Biden had a path to victory, longtime adviser Steve Ricchetti criticized the presentation, saying their job was to show how Biden could win.
Whether Biden himself ever saw the polling data remains unclear.
Another longtime Biden adviser, Mike Donilon, insisted to Pager that Biden never should have dropped out of the race.
“It was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership,” said Donilon, who was paid about $4 million for his 2024 campaign work and who claimed it was a media-driven “impression” that Biden’s acuity had diminished in his final year in office. “Tell me why you walked away from a guy with 81 million votes.”
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