There is nobody who would have been more frustrated at US President Joe Biden’s recent car-crash appearance than Dr Jill Biden. Photo / AP
When Jill Biden was asked this time last year whether she had the deciding vote on whether her husband would run for re-election, she attempted to brush off the question.
“Of course he’ll listen to me, because we’re a married couple,” the United States first lady laughed, as she doubled down on claims that her husband hadn’t “finished what he started”.
The English professor has always been a sounding board for her husband – whose side she has stuck to throughout his political career. But as concerns over the US president’s age and mental acuity reached a crescendo this week, the question has turned to how much influence Dr Biden is really wielding behind the Oval Office doors.
While he has always been prone to “gaffes”, Joe Biden’s public slip-ups have in recent weeks gone from playfully doddering to alarming.
Questions over his fitness for office have snowballed since the last northern summer when concerns centred on dressing him in tennis shoes to avoid him slipping after he tripped over a sandbag at an Air Force One ceremony.
His cognitive abilities again came under the microscope this week after Biden twice recounted meeting world leaders after they had died.
In New York, the US president told an anecdote in which he claimed to have spoken to former German chancellor Helmut Kohl at a G7 summit in Cornwall in 2021 – despite Kohl having died in 2017.
Delivering an almost-identical speech in Las Vegas, the president made another slip-up, only this time he claimed to have talked to Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who died in 1996.
But what crystallised, when the visibly angry 81-year-old mixed up the president of Egypt with his Mexican counterpart when he was trying to quell concerns of his age, revealed just how high the stakes are.
Questions were raised as to why the Administration held the emergency press conference on Friday NZT after federal prosecutors published a blistering report that referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory”.
There is nobody who would have been more frustrated at the car-crash appearance, which could have waited until yesterday, than Jill Biden, who has been known to scold aides for failing to protect her husband.
She showed she is a force to be reckoned with when she demanded to know: “Why didn’t anyone stop that?” after her husband held a shaky press conference littered with factual inaccuracies that ran for almost two hours in January 2022.
“Where were you guys?” the first lady asked, according to an excerpt of American Woman, a soon-to-be-released book by Katie Rogers, a White House correspondent for the New York Times. “Where was the person who was going to end the press conference?”
In October, the first lady shepherded her husband off stage after delivering remarks at a Human Rights Campaign dinner. The president turned to his right side, waving to the audience, before she touched his arm and led him in the opposite direction.
Known as her husband’s greatest confidante who controls everything down to her husband’s diet, Jill Biden is known to sit in on high-level political meetings during which the president will turn to her and ask: “Hey Jill, what do you think?”
While he doesn’t think the first lady is “calling the shots”, Christopher Galdieri, a professor of politics at Saint Anselm’s College, says he “wouldn’t be surprised if ‘run it by Jill’ becomes the de facto position of the Biden campaign”.
But Galdieri said he has no concerns that the first lady might be out of her depth.
“She’s been married to Joe Biden for 40 some years at this point, when he’s been in the Senate and vice- president and presidential candidate several times, I think she probably knows what she’s doing,” he says.
Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist, said the first lady was protective of her husband even back in 1988 when he was a top Iowa staffer for Biden during his presidential campaign.
She is his “most trusted adviser”, he says.
Lux, who has known Biden for 37 years, said his wife sits in on “meetings of interest to her” and “meetings where the president wants her to sit in just like Hillary Clinton did, just just like Michelle Obama did”.
But finding out how the cogs really turn in the tightly-run White House is far trickier than when Donald Trump was at the helm. Whereas Trump’s volatile premiership led to bitter feuds and public sackings of his aides, some of those in Biden’s inner circle have been with him for more than three decades.
Biden’s senior adviser Mike Donilon, who has recently parachuted from the White House to help run his 2024 campaign, started working for Biden in 1981. Another dedicated staffer, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who ran Biden’s 2020 campaign, has also swooped in to help with the campaign bid.
“Biden has people around him who he trusts, who know him … With Trump, you know, it’s pretty clear that he just wants people who are like him, and who will affirm him,” Professor Galdieri says.
“Biden doesn’t have anybody like John Kelly [Trump’s former chief of staff] who’s giving interviews about how ‘Oh my God, this horrible thing that he did or said or wanted to do’,” he adds. “Folks in ‘Biden World’ don’t tend to talk about – and certainly don’t criticise – the old boss.”
But while the Biden camp’s modus operandi has been to try to keep public-facing events brief and controlled, if they want to show that Biden can still run for office, they are going to need to start throwing him to the lions.
Last week, it was revealed the White House had passed up the opportunity to participate in the Super Bowl for the second year in a row, having turned down an interview with CBS that would have reached millions of viewers.
The bonus, some have suggested, is that the expectation is so low for Biden’s performance that if he can fumble through a town hall without completely combusting, he will have done a good job.
Any time opponents or reporters raise the issue of Biden’s age or mental acuity, his aides point to his glittering career which spans decades in the Senate before spending a further eight years at the helm of the country as Barack Obama’s vice-president.
Biden himself employs humour to deflect from the more and more frequently asked questions. “Try being 110,” he has quipped, as well as having joked that he’s “400″.
It is the sort of humour reminiscent of Ronald Reagan, who said “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience”, when he was grilled during the 1984 presidential debates over whether, at 73, he was too old to be president.
Reagan revealed 10 years later that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, with one of his sons claiming he developed the illness while in the White House.
Nancy Reagan, meanwhile, was known as the “Dragon Lady” of his administration for being the driving force when it came to influencing everything from personnel to policy decisions.
A 2021 documentary, The Reagans included commentary from their son, Ronald jnr, and he revealed that Nancy advised her husband on everything from the Aids crisis to Reaganomics.
But while it’s clearly not unusual for a first lady to have the ear of the president, for Joe Biden to win another term, he’s going to have to convince voting Americans that he’s fit and able to helm the country for another four years.
And whether that’s with his wife whispering in his ear, steering him by the elbow and organising the staff, remains to be seen.
Residential areas in both countries have suffered from deadly strikes in the conflict.