“Think about how difficult this year has been for someone who would like to engage with people,” Sen said. Chris Coons (D-Del.), A longtime friend of Biden, said. “He likes to be able to read their expressions, their answers, their intonation.”
Biden’s outgoing nature is one of the clearest ways in which his presidency seems to be different from the man he served: Barack Obama, who is notorious for not caring about the disturbing elements of politics. Biden is more like his predecessor, Donald Trump, in this way. But his thirst for human interaction did not translate into the kind of random exchange that characterized Trump’s four years in the White House. Biden’s West Wing is already much more disciplined than Trump ever was, especially when it comes to access to the president.
While Trump would seemingly randomly call friends and allies, Biden has a list of phone calls scheduled for him. While Trump did not mind and their allies wandered outside the oval office, Biden had a handful of gatekeepers controlling access to the room. While Trump sometimes watches tweets and television for days, Biden fills his day with policy notes, virtual meetings with outside experts and, of course, visiting staff in the building.
In short, the 46th president prefers a more traditional style, one he hopes will help bring the office back as it was and as he thinks it should be.
“It’s back to the normal use of president’s time,” said Terry Sullivan, executive director of the White House Transition Project, which studies how presidents spend their time. “We know when Trump wrote to tweets all this time and planned his own meetings, he disrupted his opportunities to lead … If you’re Biden, ask yourself: do I really want to spend time trying to queue? come? meetings or do I want to lead to legislation and national security? ‘The answer to that is pretty obvious. ”
Trump regularly burst when one of his four successive chiefs of staff tried to organize his time and control, stepping into the Oval Office. “When you think of President Trump, you think of a movie mogul who makes the phones work and gets people into his office and says, ‘Hey, get Joe on the phone,'” said Trump ally Matt Schlapp, president of the United States conservative, said Union, whose wife worked for the president.
Those days are over. According to three people familiar with the setup, Biden has a scheme largely designed by a trio of gatekeepers who have been with him for years: Ron Klain; Annie Tomasini, director of Oval Office operations, described as “the person who manages his life;” and Ashley Williams, who sits as a kind of executive assistant outside the Oval Office, but has been given the title of Deputy Director of Oval Office Operations to convey her importance.
Some top assistants, including senior adviser Mike Donilon and presidential board member Steve Ricchetti, have the right privileges for the Oval Office. So did Biden’s dogs – according to one of the White House officials, one of the two German shepherds, Major, recently visited him in the oval office.
But just as it affected everyone in the country, the pandemic changed the way Biden works.
He replaced personal meetings with video calls. He only allows a limited number of people into the building – even staff who would normally have been in the West Wing work from home or in the Eisenhower Executive Office building next door. He does not leave the White House regularly, although he has been to the Capitol honor killed the police officer during the riots on January 6 and to visit wounded soldiers. He is not currently planning a foreign or domestic trip.
And until this week, when he invited senators from both parties to talk about the legislation on restoration of Covid-19, he did not ask visitors to the White House.
He still tries to deal with people when he can. On January 25, the day Vice President Kamala Harris swore in Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Biden invited his family to the Oval Office, according to White House officials. At a recent policy meeting, he stopped calling the child of a National Security Council staff member to say hello. And he visits staff in person, just to sign up.
“Biden will get up and walk a fair amount through the West Wing, probably because he’s so familiar with it,” said a former Biden assistant. “He’s been sitting in the West Wing for eight years and he knows what the energy of the place is like.”
According to the White House official, Biden holds an information session every day, receives a coronavirus update, and reads a daily information book, which contains schedules, policy notes, and information about the next day.
“He likes a concise and thorough information document that explains what the competing concerns are, backgrounds, who the stakeholders are, what the precedents are, what the consequences are and then discuss with core advisers and then discuss with outside experts,” he said. Coons said. . “He learns at the intersections of reading and debating.”
While Trump prefers not to read information documents, and Obama prefers longer – sometimes dismissing the subsequent conversation with aid workers – Biden wants a memorandum and then asks their aides what its impact will be in different parts of the country. “Policy for him is not a theoretical exercise,” said Scott Mulhauser, a Democratic consultant and former Biden assistant. “It’s a practical endeavor.”
According to the three people, Biden also consults a number of outside experts, some of whom he has known in his public office for decades. Some are new to him. He will tick off a list of people he wants to talk to about a case – anyone from a city councilor in Wisconsin to a world leader in Europe – and will ask his staff to suggest a few more people he does not do not know.
The White House does not regularly announce the calls, but Biden also regularly talks to governors, mayors and local elected officials to “get input on how things are going on the ground”, according to a White House official. Last Wednesday, for example, He calls the Alabama government Kay Ivey a Republican.
Most calls are scheduled by his staff. But sometimes he just can not help himself and call himself.
“He likes talking to people,” said a former assistant. ‘He’s the classic definition of extrovert. He likes to feed other people and likes to win rooms and people with his thinking and logic, policies and suggestions, and so part of the way you do that is that you give feedback and get feedback by talking to people talk. ‘