After all, the flight was only 25 minutes long. He went home to Delaware over the weekend, in part to have his foot taken to his orthopedist. And unlike its youngest predecessors, Biden was already familiar with the unique combination of executive weakness and military austerity aboard the presidential jet, having flown more than a million miles aboard Air Force Two.
So, like a weary passenger on a shuttle, he spent most of the flight reading the newspaper.
“It’s a great honor,” he told reporters who asked about his debut flight aboard Air Force One, “but I didn ‘t think of telling you the truth.”
While Biden settles into a job he’s been looking for on and off for three decades, he’s the daily routine to be president – with a cunning secret service agency, regular updates on the country’s biggest secrets, and a press corps that is always present – – came more naturally to him than to his more recent predecessors.
He set up a regular schedule, which includes morning coffee with the first lady, meetings and phone calls from the Oval Office starting just after 9am and returning to his residence at 7pm. As he walks home along the Colonnade, he is often seen carrying a stack of binders or manila folders under one arm. He still brings a brown leather briefcase to the office.
Find his own path
Unlike his most recent predecessors – night owls who spent the dark hours reading information material (President Barack Obama) or watching television (President Donald Trump) – Biden is more of an early-to-bed type. He continued the tradition of reading letters from Americans, a handful of which were imprinted in the information material he brings home in the evening. Recently, they are focusing on the pandemic; Biden also spoke via video conference with business owners and laid-off employees who are enduring the economic crisis.
Biden spent enough time in the White House as vice president and spent eight years on West Wing corridors and administration politics as Obama’s no. 2. He has worked more time in Washington than any president in decades. Its adjustment period within the executive mansion was minimal.
“It feels like I’m going home,” he said as he entered the White House on Inauguration Day. Although he had never lived in the building before, it was a kind of return for a man who had wanted to live in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for years.
He found his old stairwells familiar and one day moved into his West Wing office one week to show his new vice president the spot on the window where his wife wrote him a Valentine’s Day greeting in 2009.
He also made surprise visits to other offices in the building and asked staff members what they were working on or consulted on specific questions regarding his Covid-19 assistance plan.
He wasted little time bragging about his new excavations to his old colleagues in the Senate. He invited nearly a quarter of all senators to the Oval Office for his first three weeks on the job for talks on his Covid-19 aid plan and a new infrastructure package. .
And he has not yet been brought down by the group of reporters who are watching every step. He showed more willingness to answer questions than Obama shouted, weighing in on the accusations of his predecessor, even though the White House insisted he was focused on other things.
The President’s Daily Letter, a highly-rated update on the country’s top intelligence, is back daily after taking place only sporadically under Trump. Biden is joined at the Oval Office by Obama, the vice president, who used an iPad to receive the briefing. Biden is managed by the update by a range of intelligence professionals.
He expressed a preference for a fire built in the fireplace of Oval Office, and sometimes even adds a log to keep it going. His dogs, two German shepherds, named Major and Champ, sometimes join him.
Structure and routine
His days are more structured than those of Trump, whose assistants began blocking large chunks of ‘executive time’ to accommodate his television viewing and phone calls. Biden’s meetings are more routine, but they usually take longer than planned. The door to the Oval Office is not considered open to everyone, as it was sometimes under Trump.
Meetings between staff members, which begin each weekday before 8 a.m. ET, are a combination of in-person and video conferencing, while the West Wing is sparsely staffed due to Covid-19 precautions. In the waning days of the Trump administration, which did not make much use of video conferencing during the pandemic, cameras were installed on the desks for the incoming team.
If Biden is unable to meet an official or cabinet secretary in person, a large screen is driven into the Oval Office for the individual to participate, as Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg did this week for a session on infrastructure. Buttigieg was isolated after one of his security agents tested positive for coronavirus. His face threatens the screen in front of the Resolute Desk.
The screen was also used to track graphs and data watching the coronavirus pandemic during briefings with federal health officials.
On weekends, Biden maintained a routine of attending public missions, in Washington at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown and at his home congregation in Delaware – events that allowed their helpers to melt back into normal life, at least for ‘ an hour. After one outing, he stops at a bagel shop; officials expect him and the first lady to be more frequent patrons of Washington’s restaurants once the pandemic is over.
More than any recent first couple, Joe and Jill Biden have shown a loving relationship, extending to private moments spent in the White House residence. For the first time in decades, no children live in the building, leaving the 55,000-square-foot mansion to the two of them. Jill Biden recently saw the president with a kiss before his first flight aboard Marine One.
The president travels to Camp David for the first time on the presidential weekend to Camp David, but even the refuge on the mountain slope was known after many trips there as vice president.
Before leaving, Biden said he plans to ‘just hang out with the family and do what we always do’, which includes playing Mario Kart in the arcade in one of the lodges with his granddaughters, which gives him a bought hat on which the presidential seal was decorated and embroidered with their name for him: Pop.
Even for someone who is well versed in presidential life, there are still some upgrades that involve the best work.
“It’s the same plane we had as vice president, but it’s much nicer in terms of the inside,” Biden said after his first Air Force One ride, which was aboard a smaller plane than the main presidential plane. due to the shorter runway. in Delaware.
He gets his first chance to ride the iconic Air Force One, a military version of a Boeing 747, on Tuesday, when he travels to Milwaukee for a CNN City Hall – his first public event in the country since taking office.
Even Biden will probably set aside his newspapers to enjoy that moment.