What is Biden’s anti-drip secret? To begin with, he ran a relatively leak-free presidential campaign, mirroring the Obama administration’s leak-avoiding practices in which he served. As someone subject to gaffes, it probably wasn’t easy for him to zip, but it seemed to become second nature to him. Running his campaign in his basement, Biden did not feel the need to leak to get on the news. If he wanted attention, he could command the press focus quickly and efficiently. The lesson extended to his team, which tended to keep the traps closed and not to fill in the blanks with anonymous comments to insistent reporters. In December, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, made this secret strategy open by promising that the new government would speak with one voice, a direct criticism of the injurious leak that characterized Trump’s presidency.
One reason Biden has managed to delay his first pressman so far is because his message discipline has disarmed the drama created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the trillions of dollars in relief. The Biden people have their point of view and maintain it.
The Trump administration leaked copiously because it brought together not a team of rivals to serve under his command, but a team of enemies, who used the press to fight their political battles and wage psychological warfare against each other in public. For example, the Javanka faction in his White House proposed a personal public relations agenda separate from that of the president, and his enemies in the White House were always leaking information about the powerful couple to incapacitate them. Biden, who has no similar warring factions, found it easier to keep the peace.
Trump longed for and reveled in these internal death struggles, something you can’t imagine Biden doing. Trump was always calling his kitchen cabinet of corporate and irregular titans like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity for advice and gossip, and these conversations tended to leak. Biden, on the other hand, tends not to leave the scene in search of a lawyer; his closest advisers have been the same people for decades and are physically installed near him in the west wing. With fewer people in fewer places proving unadulterated Biden, less gossip gets to reporters. Finally, Trump became famous for not following his reading. If an aide wanted to direct his attention to a problem, usually the best way to do it was to send it to his boss on TV, leaking the material to reporters for Trump to see him on the cable news. This put Trump on the supply and demand side for leaks.
So, of course, Trump himself was a natural hog. (Who can forget his enthusiasm for WikiLeaks pour over the Democrats?) Long before his presidency, Trump fed the New York press with blind quotes about his competitors, celebrities, public policy, fashion, crime, whatever fell into his hands. imagination, sometimes using the no gossip from “John Barron” or “John Miller” to plant stories. In his 2018 book, The Trump White House: Changing the rules of the game, journalist Ronald Kessler claims that Trump managed the news by calling reporters and providing them with inside information that he insisted was attributed to “a senior White House official.” Kessler continues: “In other cases, the media obtained reports on what Trump himself said to his friends.”
The most reliable non-Trump tap for leaks was lead consultant Kellyanne Conway, Kessler wrote, and his example inspired others in the White House to leak. The more Trump advisers leaked and the more they got away with it – remember how a mid-level Trumpie wrote an anonymous New York Times did you have an opinion on the Trump White House and then an entire book? – the more they did. It is just a slight exaggeration to say that there were more leaks than no leaks in the Trump universe.
Trump and his Trumpies believed in the government out of excitement, to constantly awaken the masses with shocking information to divert attention from a crisis or to put Trump back in charge of the news cycle. Biden’s natural instincts are for sober – more tea than tequila. It is easy to speculate, too, that the gloomy, obedient and dull political polls emanating from his White House are a deliberate counterprogramming attempt designed to drown out the excitement that Trump insisted on staging. Then again, the Trump administration leaked so porously because Trump and his aides were routinely involved in conduct that was eminently leakable. By giving so many cabinet officers and high-ranking officials the petty side of his boot, Trump made sure that they would resolve their resentments at him by leaking.
It was really an uncontrolled presidency. Flynn’s calls, the “black sites” memo and instructions for the FBI to discredit Russian interaction were just the first examples. Later, Trump’s indignations – his comments about “shit” countries; its disclosure of confidential information to visiting Russian dignitaries; the unorthodox processing of Jared Kushner’s security clearances; the transcripts of their deceptive phone conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia; and so on – they were all main courses for reporters. Internal sources who disagreed with Trump’s policies and conduct were ready to undermine his exaggeration by throwing a coin at him. Biden may be involved in a similar range, but if he is, his people have not yet reached the leak point. Their relative silence, even as they struggled with the $ 1.9 trillion aid python in Congress, implies unanimity behind the scenes with whatever Biden is doing in public. In general, people don’t leak when things are going well – and Biden’s approval rating signals that, despite a set of big issues, they are doing well.
Jonathan Swan of Axios, who wrote intelligently on the subject, says that Trump’s White House culture dictated that it should be leaked before it leaked. Some Trump leaks followed political disputes in which the frustrated loser attacked the winner one last time to take revenge. “When the decision is leaked, the loser has one last chance to eliminate it with a negative reaction from the public, Congress or even the president,” an anonymous source told Swan. So far, such disputes in the Biden government have remained off the stage, suppressed before they could leak.
Eventually, the Biden administration will leak because every administration does. Informants will whistle, someone within the government will be offended and retaliate, an international incident will explode in the face of the government, the government will split into factions and people will start talking out of hours. But until this eventual reckoning arrives, the water reservoir will remain placid and Biden will continue to project a more statesmanlike image than one of the animatronic chief executives of the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents.
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This is the first time I have written about leaks without mentioning Stephen Hess and his excellent book on the subject. Please have a read. Send book recommendations to [email protected]. My email alerts joined mine Twitter feed in a leak campaign against my RSS feed. My RSS feed says, “Bring it on”.