President Biden’s Cabinet members have been emphatic that the commander-in-chief is sharp and probative behind closed doors.
However, the 81-year-old chief executive’s interactions with key members of his administration are actually pre-scripted and carefully choreographed — with aides going over questions and discussion points with Cabinet secretaries ahead of time.
Biden has not convened a meeting of his full Cabinet since Oct. 2, 2023, nine months ago.
“The entire display is kind of an act,” one source told CNN of the closed-door get-togethers. “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’”
One unidentified Cabinet secretary told the outlet that they were unclear on the status of Biden’s health or cognitive performance because they met with the president so infrequently.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is not a Cabinet member but is nominated by the president, told House lawmakers Wednesday he had not met or spoken with Biden since May 2022.
“Any president calls, you come and you meet,” Powell said. “But that hasn’t happened.”
The Fed chair insisted that he didn’t consider the lack of conversations with the president odd, saying: “There can go by long periods of time when the Fed chair doesn’t meet with the president and that’s totally fine.”
When asked about the CNN report, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told The Post: “This is standard practice for any administration.
“There should not be surprises in Cabinet meetings, be it under President Obama or President Biden,” added Vilsack, who held the same job during the 44th president’s tenure. “If a Cabinet member has a question, you should let people know you’re going to ask it.”
Back in 2015, former Obama Transportation Secretary Transportation Ray LaHood told the New York Times that Cabinet meetings were often “all for show” and pretty scripted events.
A White House official also downplayed the significance of having such carefully scripted meetings with the president, contending that it helps boost efficiency.
“Since there is a lot of interagency effort and work on overlapping subjects, Cabinet Affairs coordinates in advance with speakers so that they know what each Cabinet Member may speak about in order to avoid duplicate briefings and redundancy,” the official said.
“That information helps the Cabinet Affairs team keep meetings efficient and make sure the right breadth of topics are discussed. This is normal under different administrations.”
However, multiple sources claimed to CNN that such carefully choreographed exchanges between the president and top officials were not the norm in the Obama administration.
“There’s this general sense of just, unbelievable holding your breath every time he does an event, every time he’s with people,” one Democrat who interacts with those in Biden’s orbit told the outlet.
“This is going to get worse.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 77, confirmed Tuesday to a congressional panel that the Cabinet had not mulled the use of the 25th Amendment power to remove Biden from office and defended his astuteness.
“The president is extremely effective in the meetings that I’ve been in with him,” she said, declining to specify when the last time the two met.
Back in February after special counsel Robert Hur’s report caused an uproar over Biden’s cognitive shape, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 64, insisted the president was sharp.
“The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused,” Mayorkas told “Meet the Press” at the time.
Biden’s allies managed to muddle through controversy over the president’s age back in February, despite him making a major gaffe at a subsequent presser, intended to allay concerns over his age, in which he referred to the Egyptian leader as the president of Mexico.
Mishaps and verbal flubs have dogged Biden’s White House tenure — even during carefully orchestrated events.
But after his debate performance last month in which he was seen on TV with a raspy voice struggling to maintain his train of thought, looking stonefaced at times, a reckoning over his age reached a fever pitch.
The floodgates opened and a torrent of leaks shed light on how many of his closest allies view his cognitive states. Thus far, 14 congressional Democrats have publicly asked him to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” actor George Clooney wrote in a stinging New York Times op-ed Wednesday, weeks after co-hosting a big-money fundraiser headlined by Biden and Obama.
Biden has insisted that he is “firmly committed” to staying the course as the presumptive nominee and stressed that he wouldn’t be running if he didn’t believe with all his “heart and soul” that he could do the job.
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