After a disastrous debate, focus falls on Joe Biden’s inner circle

When Joe Biden became engulfed in a plagiarism scandal during his first US presidential campaign in 1987, his adviser and friend Ted Kaufman was blunt: “There’s only one way to stop the sharks, and that’s pull out,” he said.

When Biden was contemplating another run for the White House in 2015, it fell to another longtime confidant, Mike Donilon, to deliver the verdict. “I caught him looking at me and gestured, What is it, Mike?” Biden later wrote in his memoir. “‘I don’t think you should do this,’ he said.”

Related: Anxious donors plot next moves after Biden debate calamity

On both occasions, Biden heeded the advice. Now, in 2024, he is president but again facing questions over his future after a car crash debate performance against Donald Trump last week. The debacle has also shone a critical light on the counsel provided by his most trusted advisers.

It was the Biden campaign that called the early debate, set rules that seemed to play into his opponent’s hands and rehearsed him for the televised showdown. Members of Biden’s family reportedly criticised his top advisers at Camp David last weekend and urged him to make changes.

Some donors have also called for a shake-up of a team that includes Donilon, a close adviser since the 1980s; Ron Klain, Biden’s first White House chief of staff; Ted Kaufman, who has at his side for more than half a century; Anita Dunn, a former White House counsel and longtime adviser; and Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer who played the role of Trump in practice sessions at Camp David.

The debate strategy was signed off by campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who helped Biden in 2020 and was appointed in January to boost his re-election campaign, and endorsed by Dunn.

“@JoeBiden’s advisers failed him,” John Morgan, a top Democratic donor, posted on the X social media platform. “Format was a disaster for him and a plus for Trump. He over practiced and was drained… who wouldn’t be.”

Morgan added: “Biden has for too long been fooled by the value of Anita Dunn and her husband. They need to go… TODAY. The grifting is gross. It was political malpractice.”

Biden’s biggest career decisions have always come down to family. His wife, Jill Biden, and son Hunter Biden are adamant that he should stay in the race for the White House and no one carries more weight. His sister Valerie Biden Owens, who ran many of his election campaigns, is one of his fiercest defenders.

Donilon, 65, Klain, 62, and 85-year-old Kaufman are the ultimate Biden insiders and will now be thinking about how to steady the ship. Biden reportedly talks to Donilon several times a day and Klain most days. Donilon was the mastermind of the 2020 election strategy focused on the defence of democracy. Both he and Klain, taking time off from his work as chief legal officer, went to Camp David for debate prep (Klain’s ninth overall).

Biden regularly meets Kaufman for lunch when he returns to Delaware for the weekend. When Biden’s family sat him down and asked him to run for president in 2008, the New York Times reported, Kaufman was the only non-Biden in the room. Valerie Biden Owens wrote in her memoir: “Joe has long since said that Ted Kaufman is the wisest man he’s ever known. Ted is his true north.”

‘The campaign is going to have to operate at a higher level now’

The Biden campaign wanted a debate unusually early, in June, to alert voters to the threat posed by Trump. They got their way in Atlanta with a mute button, no studio audience and no Robert F Kennedy. Yet Biden, 81, appeared out of sorts, stumbling over words, losing his train of thought and failing to stem the tide of Trump’s lies.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank and former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve been involved in previous debate sessions who do believe that the president was over-prepared, that his head was stuffed with too many facts and too few themes and that it would have been better to build on his instincts rather than to create poll-tested and focus-grouped alternatives to what he would have said spontaneously.”

The Democratic party has been convulsed by a debate over whether Biden should drop out in favour of a younger candidate, a process that carries massive risks of its own. But the Biden family – including Hunter – and his senior advisers have rallied around the president and insisted that he fight on.

Galston added: “I would have preferred deeper and more nuanced reflection than appears to have occurred and I’m hoping against hope that this doesn’t represent the last word on the subject but it may well.”

The day after the debate, Biden bounced back with a forceful speech in North Carolina and a pledge to keep going. In an email to supporters on Saturday, O’Malley Dillon said internal polls and focus groups showed no change in voters’ opinions in battleground states after the debate.

She warned “overblown media narratives” may drive “temporary dips in the polls”, but said she was confident Biden would win in November. The campaign is eager to end the conversation and move on. Some Democrats, however, are still demanding answers.

Simon Rosenberg, a party strategist, wrote on his Hopium Chronicles website: “Yes we need to hear from Joe Biden and the campaign in the coming days about why Thursday night went so wrong, and what can be done to ensure such terrible events don’t happen again. They need some time to discuss internally and come together around a new strategy.”

In a phone interview, Rosenberg added: “The campaign is going to have to operate at a higher level now because I think our job got a little bit harder, and we’re going to have to fight a lot harder than we were. I think people understand that. The campaign is going to have to do more and take more responsibility now than it was before. But we’re up for it.”

The Biden campaign has been condemned as insular and defensive. There were calls for it to work with – not against – allies who have legitimate concerns about what they saw last Thursday.

Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress thinktank, said: “They need not go it alone right now. They need not be bunkered at all. They’ve got to work with humility, with vulnerability, with all of the partners out here who love this president, care deeply about the crisis of democracy that we’re in and are determined to all do our part.”

He added: “That team now has a responsibility to expand the circle of support and the circle of trust and the circle of storytelling.”

The Biden campaign said in an email that no staff shake-up is under consideration. The president’s loyalty to his inner circle means that it is unlikely heads will roll; he resisted calls to fire national security adviser Jake Sullivan after the US military’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But there is pressure to change course.

Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said the campaign needs to promote the notion that what happened at that debate was a fluke. “We need to see that the norm is a robust, vigorous, energetic, capable, competent candidate. The only way to do that is to get him out there everywhere. They’ve resisted to this point doing things like the Super Bowl. They have limited his exposure. They have understandably kept him in a bit of a bubble.”

Bardella added: “People believe he can stick to a script if it’s handed to him and it’s right there before him. People believe that he can operate if there are those guardrails around him. The question that the American people have is, if those guardrails aren’t there, how will he do it? The only time they have seen him so far without those guardrails was at this debate and it was a disaster.”