Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara
Palmeri.
Everyone in D.C. is pretty much frozen in fear—my phone has been blowing up all week with officials from across the government telling me the same story: They’re not sure what to do, and the stress is making them less efficient at work. It all sounds the same. Am I going to get fired? Do I respond to this Elon Musk email? Will the DOGE boys come for my job next?
“There are 22-year-olds making calls like the gestapo, everyone is scared for their jobs, everyone is terrified,” said one official. “We’re not supposed to say this is a gestapo, but it sure feels like it.”
In tonight’s issue, news and notes on another Washington drama: the ongoing recriminations within Bidenworld, even among some of the family’s closest allies, over the president’s ill-fated
decision to run for reelection and the enablers who misled voters and the media about the extent of his declining health. For more, I spoke with Michael LaRosa, the former Jill Biden aide. More on that, below the fold.
But first, here’s the latest on Capitol Hill from Leigh Ann and Abby…
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Leigh Ann Caldwell
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Abby Livingston
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- Slouching toward a
shutdown: As everyone knows, government funding runs out on March 14, and Speaker Mike Johnson might have just made a shutdown dramatically more likely. Namely, he’s considering codifying some of DOGE’s cuts in the funding bill, according to two Republicans familiar with the conversations. (Politico has reported this as well.) It’s still only an idea at this point—albeit one that Johnson discussed yesterday at the White House with Trump, who has yet to weigh in
publicly. It’s been met with serious side-eyes from other Republican aides, who admit it would seriously imperil the bill’s passage. Democrats, of course, have been protesting DOGE cuts, and pressuring Republicans to do the exact opposite of what Johnson is contemplating: codifying restrictions on Elon Musk’s cutting frenzy.
Johnson is also considering whether to push through a government funding bill with just Republican votes. But even some Republicans might
not vote for a bill that makes permanent all of DOGE’s cuts (Johnson could take a more judicious route and codify only targeted ones). Anyway, this tactic would be nearly impossible given the narrow Republican House majority, in which a number of Republicans never vote to fund the government. And that’s before you get to its likely failure in the Senate, where some Republicans have been pushing for a simple funding extension with as few changes as possible; they have 53 votes and need
to find seven Democrats to pass any funding bill. Add all this up, and you can see why some Republicans hope Johnson doesn’t embrace this idea. —Leigh Ann Caldwell
- The midterms are already here: In normal times, the first quarter of the off-year congressional election cycle is sleepy and sluggish. But these, obviously, are not normal times. Hakeem Jeffries and his Democratic caucus are already steeped in the
fundraising and recruitment fight, and last month, House Dems raised $9.2 million—their largest haul ever in an off-year January—compared to the N.R.C.C.’s $6 million. This isn’t just because of the committee’s storied digital fundraising: Many members, including Massachusetts’ Richard Neal and New Jersey’s Frank Pallone, have been hosting fundraising dinners. A group of House progressives hosted one last night, and the Congressional Black Caucus’s
political arm will host one in early March. Along with member dues, I’m told by a senior House Democratic campaign aide that this extra push has brought in $2.8 million, or nearly a third of the January haul.
But the more pressing task for both parties is recruitment, which will lay the foundation for the next two years. As Politico’s Elena Schneider
reported this week, federal workers who fell victim to DOGE cuts might become a new talent pool of House candidates. Meanwhile, the Dems are also eyeing a huge potential get: Jimmy McCain, the Marine veteran and son of the late Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, to
run against David Schweikert in Arizona’s 1st congressional district. Of course, the defection of the so-called McCain Republicans has been partly credited with flipping the state to Joe Biden in 2020, and for some high-profile statewide losses—Blake Masters and
Kari Lake—for the party’s right wing.
For the Republicans, the recruitment picture is murkier: A party consultant told me there’s talent in the wings, but potential candidates are waiting on two developments. The first is the fate of the shutdown/debt ceiling/tax-and-spending-cuts negotiations this spring. The second is the price of eggs, which has supplanted
the price of gasoline as the leading political economic indicator in my conversations. Republicans might also have to spend some of their recruitment energy on their incumbents. I’m hearing that, for a smattering of pre-Trump Republican members, this congressional term is turning out to be even more miserable than the last one—which, of course, included the defenestration of Kevin McCarthy. My impression is that if it weren’t for their party’s micro-margin in
the House, some Republican reps would be considering resignation. —Abby Livingston
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Michael LaRosa, longtime press secretary for first lady Jill Biden, opens up about how
aides hid the president from the press and ignored bad polls, as well as the “cover-up” allegations at the center of the great 2024 blame game.
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Whatever prevented the Washington media from telling the full story of Joe
Biden’s declining health, that spell has been broken. Indeed, the same people who turned a blind eye to the president’s mental state are now buzzing about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s forthcoming book, Original Sin, which promises an “unflinching and explosive” accounting of Biden’s reelection campaign “despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.”
There’s
been a reckoning among past members of Biden’s inner circle, too. I recently sat down with Michael LaRosa, the former Biden official and longtime Jill Biden spokesperson, during a panel at American University’s Sine Institute, where I’m a fellow, to discuss the 2024 election and his unvarnished perspective on the Biden “cover-up,” such as it was. LaRosa, who left the White House in 2022, pushed back on that specific characterization, but acknowledged efforts to
hide Biden from the media with remarkable candor—describing the president’s press team as essentially “gaslighting” the American public. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Media Optics & “Gaslighting”
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Tara Palmeri: You worked so closely with the Biden family for years. I have to ask, do you
think it’s accurate, as Original Sin states, that there were “desperate efforts to hide the extent of [Biden’s] deterioration” in 2024?
Michael LaRosa: There are many things there that are true, in my view. Calling it a cover-up is a little harsh and exaggerated. Every politician, every human being, tries to cover up their age. We all wear makeup on TV.
So we were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue. From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem. I was recently quoted in the lead of a Wall Street Journal piece by Annie Linskey—I love her, she’s a good reporter, though I felt a bit like my quote may have been misconstrued. The story began with me saying that I was asked to walk back my comment to a reporter for
The Des Moines Register, who asked me to confirm the number of counties Jill Biden had visited. I had worked for her as her traveling press secretary, and the reporter was working on a profile of Jill. When I mentioned that conversation to her chief of staff [Anthony Bernal], he wasn’t happy, because they were hyperaware that if she’d been going to more counties than Biden had, that would provoke more discussion about his age.
She looked like she had more stamina and like she was on a campaign.
Yes. And look, the spouse is the supporting actor. I was not thinking about the boys team. I was thinking about my job, which was to promote my boss. But I was still, at the time, learning that this is a supporting role. I’d worked for two senators, the speaker’s office, and a congresswoman. I
was used to promoting everything the principal is doing. In this case, the principal was the spouse, who, by the way, will probably go down as one of the most influential first ladies we’ve ever had, because of the age thing.
Well, that’s the story right now—that it was Jill running the ship. And that was the story with Ronald Reagan and F.D.R. There have
always been stories that, with an aging president, the wife has to swoop in and do the job. Like when Dr. Jill Biden attended a cabinet meeting.
She was there because she was speaking on behalf of her initiative, the health initiative.
But you get the
optics.
We were an integrated part of the West Wing, because we didn’t have our own agenda. We went and championed [Joe Biden’s] agenda all around the country. Unlike Hillary and other first ladies, the only issue Jill wanted to work on was giving credit to her husband. It’s a long way of answering your question, but “cover-up” is probably a little too harsh.
Here’s another quote from the book: “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an, at times, addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”
There are some things that are true, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling. All of the polling in the
spring of 2023, and then the fall of 2023, showed that there was no real depth of support from his own party, let alone independents and Republicans. And Biden had been tied, or within the margin of error, with Trump—who had, by that point, how many court hearings? How many indictments? The fact that he was so close was always a problem, but they were kind of in denial.
The message to everybody was to make sure you tell people, “It’s too early.
These polls don’t mean anything.” Then for about a year and a half, the numbers never moved, and by denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying and undermining the really insightful journalism that The New York Times was doing, that you were doing, and all of the free press, they were actually demeaning a lot of those people.
It was the data denial that really bothered me,
because we loved polling when we were running right. We’re going to go on Howard Stern, [but] we’re not going to talk to The New York Times? They were doing that in spite. But what they didn’t understand, and what they still don’t get, is that it can’t be either-or. You can’t choose to alienate certain constituencies, and certain audiences, just for the sake of pandering to another.
Anyway, the point is that they did do a
lot of gaslighting. If you were watching MSNBC, you probably believed them. But if you were consuming information, consuming data, and looking at it objectively, and trying to interpret it and process it objectively, none of it was surprising.
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Were you concerned about Biden running for reelection in 2024?
When I got to the White House, I was starry-eyed. I’d wanted to work in the White House since I was 5 years old, when I memorized the presidents from a place mat. And it was incredible to be there. I used to drive my boss home every night, my chief of staff, because we lived in the same building, and I remember him saying something about, “Well, that’s after the reelect. That’s a second term
[issue].” I said, “Wait, what?”
So you believed Biden when he said he would be a “bridge.”
It wasn’t that I believed in “the bridge.” I just assumed—kind of like Barack Obama probably assumed. I figured that by 2024, this was going to be, “Okay, we’re going to pass the torch
to another generation of Democrats, and let them handle a Trump 2.0 campaign.” But I was brought to reality pretty fast. Like, “Why not? Why wouldn’t he run?” They were kind of either stuck with him, or they were eating their vegetables and saying, “He’s our best shot. Not a socialist from Vermont. We’re comfortable with him, he’s competent, he’s earned a lot of goodwill.” Ultimately, the problem with deciding to run again was a misread of our mandate. When Biden was elected,
we lost 13 House seats.
Who was driving the reelect? Was it Jill or White House staffers who wanted to hold on to power?
Jill would be the first person in her convertible driving to the beach, and she’d never have a reason to come back to D.C. She wants only what he wants, and that’s how their lives have always been. But what
really got under their skin was the media and other Democrats questioning whether he should run again. Every time there was a story about his age, or whether he could do another election, or whether he should be the candidate, they just doubled down. They felt, “We’ve proved everybody wrong in the past. Obama tried to push him out of the 2016 campaign—not once, but twice. Nobody thought we’d win the nomination. Nobody thought he could beat an incumbent.” To them, this was another
example of everyone underestimating them.
Keeping him away from the press was a way to cover up his condition.
The president’s team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unchoreographed anything. They couldn’t compete in the attention economy. They didn’t have any idea how. And they didn’t have the
vessel in Biden, who would have done anything. He loves TV. He loves doing stuff. It was the orbit that didn’t trust the candidate.
Biden needed the press, but when he needed the press the most, they didn’t trust him. And then the press put their foot on the gas and never took it off, and he was politically dead in a month.
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