“Think about how difficult this year has been for someone who loves to bond with people,” said Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), A longtime friend of Biden. “He loves to be able to read their expressions, their responses, their intonation.”
Biden’s expansive nature is one of the clearest ways in which his presidency seems destined to be different from the man he served: Barack Obama, who infamous did not care about the small talk in politics. Biden is more like his predecessor, Donald Trump, in that sense. But his thirst for human interaction did not translate into the kind of random exchanges that characterized Trump’s four years at the White House. Biden’s west wing is already much more disciplined than Trump’s, especially when it comes to access to the president.
While Trump called friends and allies apparently at random, Biden has a list of calls scheduled for him. Although Trump doesn’t mind that helpers and outside allies enter the Oval Office, Biden has a handful of doormen who control access to the room. While Trump sometimes spent days tweeting and watching television, Biden fills the day with policy memos, virtual meetings with outside experts and, of course, visiting employees around the building.
In short, the 46th president prefers a more traditional style, which he hopes will help restore the position he was in and how he thinks he should be.
“This is returning to normal use of the president’s time,” said Terry Sullivan, the executive director of the White House Transition Project, who studies how presidents spend their time. “We know that when Trump spent all that time writing tweets and scheduling his own meetings, he was wasting his opportunities to lead … If you’re Biden, you’re wondering ‘if I really want to spend time trying to line up meetings or do I want to lead about legislation and national security? ‘The answer is quite obvious. “
Trump was often irritated when any of his four successive team leaders tried to organize his time and control who could enter the Oval Office. “When you think of President Trump, you think of a movie tycoon working on the phones, getting people in and out of his office and saying ‘hey, call Joe on the phone,'” said Trump’s ally Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, whose wife worked for the president.
Those days are over. Biden has a schedule drawn up largely by a trio of porters who have been with him for years, according to three people familiar with the setup: chief of staff Ron Klain; Annie Tomasini, director of operations for the Oval Office, described as “the person who runs your life”; and Ashley Williams, who sits outside the Oval Office as a sort of executive assistant, but has received the title of Oval Office deputy director of operations to demonstrate her importance.
Some key advisors, including senior adviser Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, the president’s adviser, have privileges to enter the Oval Office. The same is true of Biden’s dogs – one of the two German shepherds, the major, recently visited him in the Oval Office, according to a White House official.
But just as it has affected everyone across the country, the pandemic has changed the way Biden works.
He replaced personal meetings with video calls. It allows only a limited number of people in the building – even the team that would normally be in the West Wing is working at home or in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door. He doesn’t leave the White House very often, although he went to the Capitol to honor the policeman killed in the January 6 riots and to visit wounded soldiers. He is not planning a trip abroad or nationally yet.
And until this week, when he We invite senators from both parties to talk about Covid-19’s recovery legislation, he was not asking visitors to the White House.
He still tries to interact with people when he can. On January 25, the day Vice President Kamala Harris took an oath on behalf of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Biden invited his family to the Oval Office, according to the White House official. During a recent political meeting, he stopped to call the son of a National Security Council official to say hello. And he visits the team in person, just to check in.
“Biden is going to get up and walk around the west wing a lot, probably because he’s so familiar with it,” said a former Biden aide. “He has been sitting in the West Wing for eight years and knows what the energy is like here.”
Every day, Biden conducts an intelligence briefing, receives a coronavirus update and reads a daily briefing book, which includes schedules, policy memos and intelligence summaries for the next day, according to the White House official.
“He likes a concise and complete briefing article that clarifies what are the competing concerns, experiences, who are the stakeholders, what are the precedents, what are the consequences and then discuss with the main consultants and debate with experts external relations, ”said Coons. “He learns at the intersections of reading and debate.”
While Trump preferred not to read information documents and Obama preferred the longer ones – sometimes dismissing the subsequent conversation with aides that followed – Biden wants a memo and then asks the aides what the impact would be in different parts of the country. “Policy making for him is not a theoretical exercise,” said Scott Mulhauser, a Democratic consultant and former Biden adviser. “It is a practical effort.”
Biden also consults a number of outside experts, some of whom he has known for decades in public office, some who are new to him, according to the three people. He will mark a list of people he wants to talk to about a topic – from a Wisconsin city council member to a world leader in Europe – and ask his team to suggest a few more people he doesn’t know.
The White House does not usually announce the calls, but Biden is also talking regularly with governors, mayors and local elected officials to seek “suggestions on how things are going on the ground,” according to a White House official. For example, he called Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican.
Most calls are scheduled by your team. But sometimes, he just can’t help it and makes the calls himself.
“He likes to talk to people,” said a former aide. “It’s the classic definition of an extrovert. He likes to feed on other people and likes to conquer rooms and people with his thinking, logic, policies and proposals and therefore part of the way you do that is to give feedback and get feedback by talking to people. “