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from https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/apr/8/decider-within-biden-white-house/?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAQxpSN9K3ezs0lGPH5yN31_5TIlwEqKggAIhBcERswRnPnLkaJ3_gLN8OaKhQICiIQXBEbMEZz5y5Gid_4CzfDmg&utm_content=rundown

Who was the ‘decider’ within the Biden White House?
The Biden White House illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times

Commentary
By David Keene - The Washington Times - Tuesday, April 8, 2025
OPINION:

As president, George W. Bush proudly assured visitors that he and no one
else was “decider.” Just who was the “decider” in the Biden White House as the president of the United States slipped into senility remains an unanswered question.

That may be about to change. Insider accounts are dribbling out about
President Biden’s inability to run the country. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ “Fight” hit bookstore shelves last week. Chris Whipple’s “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest
Campaign in History” will be published this week and includes
devastating observations from Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff from
2021 to 2023.

Neither book addresses that question head-on, but both detail the mental deterioration and insider concerns about their boss’ ability to do his
job. Mr. Klain, a competent insider with years of experience, writes of
his concern about a president who could not understand his programs or
the mood of the voters. Mr. Klain prepared Mr. Biden for the debate with
Mr. Trump and was shocked by his mental and physical deterioration since
Mr. Klain left the White House. Both “mock” or practice debates ended
early because the president was tired and almost incoherent. Mr. Klain
told Mr. Whipple he feared the debate would be “a nationally televised disaster.” It was.

Yet Mr. Klain, like others in Mr. Biden’s inner circle, urged him to run
for a second term, knowing he wasn’t capable of serving. They and their allies in the media covered up his true condition and assured his
party’s leaders and voters that he was up to the job and could win a
second term. Even after the debate that would end Mr. Biden’s candidacy,
Mr. Klain told Mr. Whipple that he believed Mr. Biden should have stayed
in the race and could have defeated Mr. Trump.

Mr. Klain’s account confirms that Democratic operatives were planning to
run Mr. Biden for a second term, in a disservice to the man they worked
for and in betraying the duty they owed their country. Many justified
their actions after the election by claiming they thought Mr. Biden,
unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, would have defeated Mr. Trump.

That rationale pales compared with the constitutional negligence of the
Biden administration. White House staff, the Cabinet and all their
immediate staff, and mainstream media were aware that Mr. Biden had
checked out, leaving the decisions he should have made in the hands of
staffers and underlings. Being a White House staffer is a heady rush,
but staffers must have been wildly elated not to have anyone nix their
whims, say to draft an executive order and ship it off to the autopen.
That they no doubt didn’t want to end might be understandable if the
country were not at stake. They persuaded themselves to let the good
times roll for another four years if they could prop up the boss for
another run. After all, he won the race in 2020 from his basement.

In early 2024, after a meeting with the president at which Mr. Biden
denied even knowing about signing an executive order banning liquefied
natural gas exports, House Speaker Mike Johnson wondered, “Who is
running the country?” It certainly wasn’t Mr. Biden. Did Mr. Biden understand that in the final days of his presidency, he had authorized
Ukraine to launch U.S.-supplied missiles against targets deep within
Russia? Or that Pentagon officials believed the authorization might have crossed a red line that made nuclear war a possibility?

It is possible that, as some speculated at the time, the government was
being run by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of
State Antony Blinken in tandem with the Biden family and/or Chief of
Staff Jeff Zients with over-the-shoulder advice from former President
Barack Obama.

Some of the almost desperate attempts to protect the “woke” agenda at
risk during the impending Trump swearing-in might even have motivated a
few of the young, liberal activists on the White House staff to use the
autopen to advance not Mr. Biden’s agenda but their own. We don’t know
for sure, but we do know that none of these folks was elected, and they
and whoever else was operating in the president’s place were doing so illegally.

Secrets are hard to keep in Washington. As principals begin to whisper
and then talk openly about what occurred in the final months of the
Biden debacle, the public will learn who decided what. When the public
learns who quietly usurped the power of the presidency itself and acted
as if they were the president, there will have to be an accounting lest
it happen again.

• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.

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