Who was the ‘decider’ within the Biden White House?

OPINION:

As president, George W. Bush proudly assured visitors that he and no one else was “decider.” Just who was the “decider” in the Biden White House as the president of the United States slipped into senility remains an unanswered question.

That may be about to change. Insider accounts are dribbling out about President Biden’s inability to run the country. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ “Fight” hit bookstore shelves last week. Chris Whipple’s “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” will be published this week and includes devastating observations from Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff from 2021 to 2023.

Neither book addresses that question head-on, but both detail the mental deterioration and insider concerns about their boss’ ability to do his job. Mr. Klain, a competent insider with years of experience, writes of his concern about a president who could not understand his programs or the mood of the voters. Mr. Klain prepared Mr. Biden for the debate with Mr. Trump and was shocked by his mental and physical deterioration since Mr. Klain left the White House. Both “mock” or practice debates ended early because the president was tired and almost incoherent. Mr. Klain told Mr. Whipple he feared the debate would be “a nationally televised disaster.” It was.

Yet Mr. Klain, like others in Mr. Biden’s inner circle, urged him to run for a second term, knowing he wasn’t capable of serving. They and their allies in the media covered up his true condition and assured his party’s leaders and voters that he was up to the job and could win a second term. Even after the debate that would end Mr. Biden’s candidacy, Mr. Klain told Mr. Whipple that he believed Mr. Biden should have stayed in the race and could have defeated Mr. Trump.

Mr. Klain’s account confirms that Democratic operatives were planning to run Mr. Biden for a second term, in a disservice to the man they worked for and in betraying the duty they owed their country. Many justified their actions after the election by claiming they thought Mr. Biden, unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, would have defeated Mr. Trump.

That rationale pales compared with the constitutional negligence of the Biden administration. White House staff, the Cabinet and all their immediate staff, and mainstream media were aware that Mr. Biden had checked out, leaving the decisions he should have made in the hands of staffers and underlings. Being a White House staffer is a heady rush, but staffers must have been wildly elated not to have anyone nix their whims, say to draft an executive order and ship it off to the autopen. That they no doubt didn’t want to end might be understandable if the country were not at stake. They persuaded themselves to let the good times roll for another four years if they could prop up the boss for another run. After all, he won the race in 2020 from his basement.

In early 2024, after a meeting with the president at which Mr. Biden denied even knowing about signing an executive order banning liquefied natural gas exports, House Speaker Mike Johnson wondered, “Who is running the country?” It certainly wasn’t Mr. Biden. Did Mr. Biden understand that in the final days of his presidency, he had authorized Ukraine to launch U.S.-supplied missiles against targets deep within Russia? Or that Pentagon officials believed the authorization might have crossed a red line that made nuclear war a possibility?

It is possible that, as some speculated at the time, the government was being run by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in tandem with the Biden family and/or Chief of Staff Jeff Zients with over-the-shoulder advice from former President Barack Obama.

Some of the almost desperate attempts to protect the “woke” agenda at risk during the impending Trump swearing-in might even have motivated a few of the young, liberal activists on the White House staff to use the autopen to advance not Mr. Biden’s agenda but their own. We don’t know for sure, but we do know that none of these folks was elected, and they and whoever else was operating in the president’s place were doing so illegally.

Secrets are hard to keep in Washington. As principals begin to whisper and then talk openly about what occurred in the final months of the Biden debacle, the public will learn who decided what. When the public learns who quietly usurped the power of the presidency itself and acted as if they were the president, there will have to be an accounting lest it happen again.