Chaos in the White House has been replaced by a vacuum
DAMON LINKER
JUNE 11, 2021
Images of Joe Biden giving speeches and shaking hands with foreign dignitaries during his ongoing trip to Europe will take up space in the news over the coming week. But once he returns to the United States, the pattern that's prevailed over the past five months will likely resume.
Which means the president will once again disappear.
It was common for Democrats during the 2020 presidential campaign to talk encouragingly about how boring a Biden administration would be in comparison to the nonstop cycle of chaos, cruelty, and outrage that prevailed under President Trump. Where Trump tweeted partisan provocations day and night, keeping reporters and pundits furiously scribbling, analyzing, and denouncing 24/7, life under a Biden presidency would return to normal, with a slower pace and the president receding from public view, allowing other people and topics to proliferate, and our nation's public life to settle down and heal, perhaps even with a modicum of unity returning.
That isn't what's happened. Biden has indeed stepped back — in comparison to Trump, absolutely, but even compared to Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Biden simply doesn't say or do very much in public. He's content, instead, to allow surrogates, staffers, and Democrats in Congress to take the lead in getting the administration's message out. The result is that it often feels as if we have no president at all.
Yet the nation hasn't quieted. On the contrary, the virtual wars that roiled the country over the previous four years have continued. The primary difference is that the president plays very little part in them. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it's not especially encouraging either. Indeed, it points to deeper cultural and political changes that set the context for the presidency.
https://theweek.com/joe-biden/1001389/joe-biden-the-incredible-vanishing-president
