Like Biden's Dogs, the Age Story Will Never Stop Biting

Joe Biden has previously shown a callous refusal to act when people around him were getting hurt. But when the situation became untenable enough, he gave in.

Dear readers,

Donald Trump famously does not like dogs, and people like to draw adverse inferences about his character from this fact. Well, what does President Biden’s relationship to dogs tell us about him? He does like dogs, and during his presidency he unfortunately brought two different German shepherds with serious biting problems to the White House.¹ And as these dogs repeatedly bit Secret Service agents and White House residence staff, the Bidens resisted the obvious solution of sending the dogs away, and instead pretended there was no serious problem. They sent their staff out to explain that the dogs simply had not yet adapted to the White House environment and needed more training. Major Biden was “surprised by an unfamiliar person,” then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a White House press briefing in 2021, after Major had bitten Secret Service agents eight times in eight days. (At the time, the White House disclosed only one of the biting incidents.) Commander Biden was being “over-protective,” a “source close to the Biden family” told CNN earlier this year, as part of an explanation of how it came to be that Commander bit Secret Service agents at least 24 times over a period of 9 months, in one instance biting a uniformed officer’s arm and leg deeply enough to require hospital treatment.

I bring the dog story up for two reasons. One is that it reflects how the president and his family have been selfish and stubborn, putting their desire to do something irresponsible over the best interests of the people around them. The other is that the Bidens eventually, belatedly, gave in and did the right thing when it became impossible to look away from the reality: these dogs were too dangerous to keep around the White House, and they needed to be sent away to live with friends in Delaware, far from the bitable forearms of any Secret Service agents.

The Bidens — and I say “the Bidens” advisedly, because Joe Biden’s relatives are clearly heavily influencing the decisions he makes right now — are engaged in a similar bout of delusion, selfishness and irresponsibility right now, with their insistence that the president remains capable of running an effective campaign and convincing the American people that he is in good enough physical and mental condition to serve as president through January 2029. You might say that his doomed presidential campaign is a poorly-trained, bite-happy German shepherd, and we the American people are the helpless White House residence staff. The task that stands before us over the next few weeks is to make it impossible for the Bidens to look away from the grievous and immoral risk they are foisting upon all of us, and get them to take the only course of action that can best protect all of us: agreeing to send Joe back to his dogs in Delaware, so a new candidate — one capable of beating Trump — can lead our party into the November election.

President Joe Biden (right) and his dog, Commander, walked in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday, June 21, 2022 — in happier times, before the start of the biting spree. (Photo by: HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Over the last week, it’s become clear that Biden is instead pursuing a strategy to retain his place at the head of the Democratic ticket. The strategy doesn’t rely on demonstrating that his mental acuity is far better than how it appeared in last month’s debate, and it doesn’t rely on presenting a convincing case that he can overcome his polling deficit and retake the lead from Donald Trump. Nor does it rely on rebutting the poll evidence that several possible replacement candidates — including but not limited to the vice president — would be more likely to beat Trump. Instead, it relies on threats: I’m not going anywhere, he warns, and so if Democrats keep talking about how he needs to be replaced, that will only make the whole ticket weaker as he continues to lead it into the November election.

Biden is treating us the way Trump has treated Republicans for a decade: he’s pointing a gun at the head of the Democratic party and threatening to shoot if he doesn’t get his way. He’s putting his vanity ahead of the interests of his party and his country, and he’s therefore making a mockery of Democrats’ message that preserving our democracy requires that we prioritize beating Trump over all else. I am incandescently angry about it. But I also don’t believe the opportunity to push Biden aside has passed. I think he and his team are confused about exactly what they have and have not quelled by pressing Democrats to get in line, and I think the increasing untenability of his position will become only clearer through the month of July and eventually lead to him choosing to withdraw.

What Biden does seem to be succeeding at so far is slowing the pace of congressional Democrats calling for him to withdraw. He has loud supporters on Capitol Hill making the case that good partisans should line up behind the president. Sometimes these arguments are coming in absurd terms, like when Congressional Black Caucus chair Steven Horsford said on CNN that the calls for Biden to withdraw are a demonstration of “ageism and ableism.” And these arguments are not completely stopping the president’s intraparty detractors from speaking out — on Monday evening, even as the president was supposedly solidifying his position, Sen. Patty Murray (the fourth-ranking Democrat in Senate leadership) put out a statement saying that Biden “must do more to demonstrate he can campaign strong enough to beat Donald Trump” and “must seriously consider the best way to preserve his incredible legacy and secure it for the future.” On Tuesday, Rep. Mikie Sherrill called for Biden to withdraw. But it’s true that the dam hasn’t broken, and some efforts to push him aside (like Sen. Mark Warner’s abortive plan to gather a group of Senate Democrats to pressure the president) have been stymied.

What Biden has not succeeded at — and will not succeed at — is taking this story off the front page. The strategy of demanding that people simply shut up about this topic will work on some Democratic politicians and operatives, but it will only annoy reporters into talking about it more, and it won’t stop voters from looking at what’s right before their eyes and worrying that this man is simply not up to the job anymore. So if Biden remains as a candidate, his health and his fitness to serve will remain the dominant story for the duration of the campaign. Every public event Biden does will be analyzed through the lens of whether he appears to be compos mentis or not. And everywhere Democratic politicians go, the main thing reporters will want to ask them about is Biden, and whether they really think he’s a suitable standard bearer for their party and ready to lead the country until January 2029.²

The age and infirmity story will be Biden’s version of Hillary’s emails, but with the key difference that the media won’t actually be overselling the story’s importance — whether a candidate is declining mentally such that he won’t be able to execute his office is obviously and appropriately a central concern in an election.

Faced with four more months of constant discussion about Biden’s age, Democratic politicians will have two options. One is to tell the absurd lie that Biden seems fine, which will only make them look ridiculous and demoralize voters. The other is to level with people — to say the White House works because Biden has a team around him keeping the lights on, and that if he can’t make it to 2029, he’ll just step aside and Kamala Harris will take over. This approach also sucks — it entails admitting that you have a candidate who isn’t up to the job, and it requires Democrats to defend all of Harris’s political downsides without enjoying the upsides they’d get if they actually made her the nominee, such as how her relative youth and vitality would compare favorably to both Trump and Biden. It’s also a message that base voters draw misleading comfort from — they think this is a good message because they, as partisan Democrats, trust the faceless Democrats who surround the president, but marginal voters have never heard of Avril Haines or Gina Raimondo and won’t be comforted by the idea that Biden will, as necessary, outsource his duties to a bunch of unelected party leaders.

As it becomes increasingly clear that Biden will never turn the page on this story, the situation will wear on Democratic elected officials, whose panic about what lies ahead in November is likelier to intensify than subside. Any tactical efforts to completely contain Democratic Party discussion of the topic that has everybody tearing their hair out will fail. The continued panic should eventually wear on the president himself — even if he continues to believe he is fit to serve and capable of beating Trump, he should eventually start to worry that (as he is already warning!) his colleagues’ continued vocalization of doubts about his fitness will undermine his campaign and cause him to lose.

In a way, this perspective is ego-saving: Biden is welcome to go to his grave believing that he would have won the election if only Mark Warner and Maura Healey and Adam Smith and Tom Friedman and whoever else had not stabbed him in the back, and he can withdraw with the explanation that their disloyalty is what made it impossible for him to win. And I believe that’s where we’re likely to head over the next few weeks — just as he eventually came to realize that Major and Commander’s tenures in the White House could not be as long as he hoped, he can eventually be convinced that his own stay will have to be cut shorter than he expected, too.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Major and Commander are the dogs with bite problems. Biden also had a third German shepherd, the now-deceased Champ, who was already quite elderly at the time Biden took office and seems to have been too old to have much enthusiasm for biting.

2. Democrats in Congress will get to enjoy the experience Republican politicians have endured for years — dodging constant questions about their party’s leader and desperately wishing they could focus on anything else.