It’s difficult to divine from the histories of the Biden administration written so far just how active a role the president has played in governing the country. The titles of Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician and Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life put Biden at the centre of the story, while Alexander Ward’s The Internationalists casts the administration’s foreign policy forthrightly as a team effort. All draw on published accounts and interviews with aides and officials – some named (especially in Whipple) and others not, though their points of view, if not actual identities, are easy to glean – and view Biden himself at a distance. He presides over meetings, attends ceremonies and picks up the telephone to prod legislators, chastise despots and puff his appointees on a job well done.
Whereas accounts of the Trump White House varied from clown show to cesspool, with backstabbing among hacks, mercenaries and scumbags, the histories of the Biden administration present a succession of earnest and credentialled professionals lining up to help the president better the country and the world. Jeff Zients, a management consultant who made $200 million before the age of forty by starting and taking public a series of research and investment firms and served the Obama administration as ‘chief performance officer’, ran Biden’s transition organisation before becoming his Covid tsar. Zients’s team included a former healthcare executive who had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent and now kept the public informed via Twitter about the administration’s pandemic efforts; a former field geologist and volunteer firefighter who whipped Pfizer into ramping up vaccine production; and a former head of the Food and Drug Administration who once impounded thousands of gallons of ‘pure squeezed’ orange juice on suspicion of insufficient freshness. These men were the brash but ‘low-ego’ technocrats who got the job done. Female aides have also thrived in the Biden White House. ‘He is completely comfortable with women in authority roles,’ Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, told Whipple. ‘He doesn’t need to have, like, a “bro” conversation. I’ve never experienced that ever with him.’