‘Tis the season for revenge! Because President Joe Biden is spending the remaining weeks of his presidency settling scores.
In between organizing this year’s White House Christmas decorations, staff parties and a series of final farewells, the president and his First Lady Jill Biden have quietly sharpened the metaphorical carving knives, with their eyes firmly on the former allies they view as wronging them have done.
Biden angered many leading members of the Democratic Party with his shocking reversal and pardon of his son Hunter a fortnight ago, after months of publicly vowing he would not take such a step.
The pardon was followed by the quiet commuting of about 1,500 sentences, including for a member of the Chinese Communist Party who was caught with child pornography on his computer.
Now, sources say, the First Lady has goaded her husband to further stoke anger among his colleagues.
‘Jill looks at the Democrats on Capitol Hill, the [wider] party, the Obamas, staff inside and outside the White House, the media and all of Washington DC with such misplaced resentment that I can’t imagine them [isn’t] encouraging [Joe] to burn the whole place down, despite his better judgment,” said an insider.
A particular target for the First Couple would be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the effort to oust Biden from the 2024 election race – personally calling him and demanding he resign in the hours before he withdrew on June 21 .
The pair had been friends for about 50 years, but a wounded Biden has since given her the silent treatment. Any recovery of relations is considered unlikely.
In between organizing this year’s White House Christmas decorations, staff parties and a series of final farewells, the president and his First Lady Jill Biden have quietly sharpened the metaphorical carving knives, with their eyes firmly on the former allies they view as wronging them have done.
During the annual Kennedy Center Honors held in DC earlier this month, it was noted that Pelosi was sitting far away and out of the Bidens’ line of sight.
She and her husband Paul Pelosi had been guests of honor at the presidential box in recent years. Now they were relegated to the orchestra section on the floor.
Also present at the awards ceremony were Vice President and recent election loser Kamala Harris, along with her husband Doug Emhoff. As is correct for a VP, they were in the presidential box, next to the Bidens. Though astute observers were quick to point out that as the crowd rose to welcome the president and his wife, they didn’t even glance at Harris or Emhoff.
Why? One Democratic mega-donor, Florida attorney John Morgan, is now wondering out loud whether Biden deliberately forced Kamala Harris onto the ticket — throwing his support behind him within minutes of withdrawing — in favor of Pelosi and Barack Obama , who had also worked behind the scenes. to push Biden out, and both of whom had serious reservations about Harris’ abilities.
‘[Biden] basically had the coup from all sides, from George Clooney to Pelosi. I think he got angry [and] said, ‘F*** you,’ and gave us Harris,” said Morgan, who has known Biden for decades and attended a “thank you” dinner for donors at the White House last month.
“Pelosi had told her delegation that there would be a convention and nomination process. And Barack Obama disagreed [Harris] for five days,” Morgan noted.
Whether Biden’s endorsement of Harris was for honest reasons or not – one thing is now certain: the president has given his vice president the cold shoulder after her resounding loss to Donald Trump last month, which left her in both the popular vote and in the election defeated. electoral college.
Some officials told the Daily Mail that Biden sincerely believed Harris could beat Trump and that they struggle to understand how she botched the race — and $1 billion in campaign contributions — so spectacularly.
Of course, some within the Democratic Party are blaming Biden himself — arguing that he should have dropped out of the race much sooner than he did, and that more time would have benefited Harris’ campaign.
“It’s almost Shakespearean that Biden killed not only his own campaign, but hers as well,” a Harris campaign adviser told the Washington Post rather dramatically on Monday.
Some officials told the Daily Mail that Biden sincerely believed Kamala Harris (pictured with husband Doug Emhoff) could beat Donald Trump and is struggling to understand how she botched the race — and $1 billion in campaign contributions — so spectacularly.
One Democratic megadonor, Florida lawyer John Morgan, is now wondering out loud whether Biden deliberately forced Harris onto the ticket to thwart Nancy Pelosi (pictured) and Barack Obama, who had also been working behind the scenes to push Biden out Push.
Either way, the blame-shifting doesn’t make for a very cheerful atmosphere during the holidays, a time when D.C. officials usually gather to celebrate the successes of the past twelve months.
This year there have been fewer holiday parties for staff and party supporters than in previous years — with both the president and first lady choosing to leave the country during the first week of December, when many of the events normally take place. (Biden was in Africa and Jill was in Europe).
Some Democratic members have been given tours of the White House in lieu of a usual party invitation, while some parties that did go ahead were scheduled at less favorable times.
The party for White House staff was Monday at 1 p.m. Everyone went back to work after this.
Of course, the Bidens hosted a big dinner for donors on the South Lawn in November.
Guests dined in the glass pavilion overlooking the Washington Monument. The Bidens held a receiving line — although no official photos were allowed — to thank people for coming.
With Trump’s second term approaching, many attendees saw the dinner as their last chance to be in the White House — at least for a while.
Biden wiped away an occasional tear as he spoke to guests.
He has been quite melancholy in recent weeks as he wraps up his presidency and more than fifty years in public office.
‘I think it’s a human emotion. This has been his life and he is preparing to transition into a new phase,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell, a friend of Biden, told the Mail.
Other friends told the New York Times on Tuesday that Biden is known to be a bit seasonally depressed this time of year — when the anniversary of the 1972 car crash that killed his first wife and daughter falls.
But the mood among White House staff is also rather somber – not least because they have to find new jobs while still running the country.
And there is still a lot to do: the current resolution that funds the government expires on December 20. There is no ceasefire in the Middle East. Ukraine is still at war.
Perhaps understandably, many weary staffers privately admit that they are just trying to get through the next month before taking some much-needed time off.
At least publicly, the Biden administration has been eager to reassure Americans that the president remains hard at work.
“President Biden is spending every day of his presidency getting things done for the American people,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt wrote in a recent memo released to staff.
Not that it has done much to stop speculation about the decidedly weak president — or about his alleged feud with Harris.
At a White House women’s health conference held last week, Jill Biden was widely interpreted as openly mocking Harris’ campaign.
“We all need to ‘feel joy’ right now. At this time of the season, right at this time,” she told an audience in the East Room. They burst out laughing.
“You’re all reading into that,” she replied. Harris had made “joy” a central tenet of her campaign.
Party donor John Morgan believes the Bidens were lied to about the state of Harris’ campaign. In the week leading up to the election, campaign officials informed donors and the press that their internal polling showed Harris with a wide lead over Trump. They said she could win all seven battleground states. In the end, she didn’t win any.
“They lied to us, and I think they lied to the president,” Morgan told the Mail.
Biden is now looking at his next steps, which means planning for a future outside official life. Many expect him to locate his presidential library in Delaware.
For her part, Jill Biden is retiring. She announced this week that she has spent her final semester teaching at Northern Virigina Community College, where she has been a professor of English.
“I will always love this profession, which is why I continued to teach full-time while I was your first lady,” she said in a statement.
But trouble could lie ahead. There are rumors that many Democratic donors are upset with Biden for not stepping down as a candidate sooner — and as a result, may not donate to his post-presidential efforts.
However, the Biden family appears to be building strong relationships elsewhere. It is notable that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Archewell Foundation donated $250,000 last year to first daughter Ashley Biden’s women’s wellness center in Philadelphia. Biden’s daughter received the foundation’s largest donation of 2023.
Whatever happens, Biden has made it clear that he and Jill will remain in the public sphere. As he recently said, “We will no longer be president and first lady, but we are not going away.”
Undoubtedly, not everyone in the party will be happy with that.