Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Joe Biden arrives to board Air Force One, March 5, 2024, in Hagerstown, Maryland.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Last June, CNN ran a glowing profile of Anita Dunn, President Joe Biden’s messaging and media guru who holds a prominent place in the president’s tight inner circle. The story kicked off with an anecdote that’s more telling than Bidenworld wants to admit.
According to CNN, it was Dunn who saw a messaging opportunity in “Dark Brandon,” the short-lived meme depicting the president as a laser-eyed omnipotent political chess master. She apparently took it to the president, who approved selling “Dark Brandon” T-shirts in his 2024 campaign store. Rob Flaherty, the re-election campaign’s digital director, celebrated the move. “It fits well with who she is, which is a f**k-sh*t-up-brawler. It’s not a coincidence that the stuff that came behind Dark Brandon was very much in line with Anita’s way of seeing the world,” Flaherty told CNN.
Dunn did not create Dark Brandon. American right-wingers started the phrase, Chinese propaganda provided the iconography, and Democrats jeeringly adopted it when Biden had a string of good news cycles in summer 2022. Other people did all of the work of generating an image of the president as cold-blooded, confident, and hyper-competent—exactly the narrative that Biden’s own team has failed to seed. Dunn just saw people liked it and capitalized. For this, her peers proclaimed the longtime corporate spin doctor a “f**k-sh*t-up-brawler.”
In the months since that CNN profile, anxiety about the president’s age has only increased, alongside displeasure with an economy celebrated by actual economists, and moral outrage at U.S. underwriting of a human rights atrocity in Gaza playing out on our screens and feeds every day. The president is perceived as doddering and ineffectual. Especially as he faces down Donald Trump, who thrives in nonstop conflict, Biden needs to fight back, address his critics, and give the public a reason to believe in him.
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It would be a good time to have a “brawler-in-chief” running presidential messaging, as the CNN headline described Dunn. So where is this fight-picker we’ve heard so much about? Is the Biden team capable of a more advanced media strategy than noticing what other people do, and turning it into T-shirts?
The conspicuous absence of a campaign has been the entire Biden 2024 campaign thus far. At The Nation, Jeet Heer notes that Biden has held neither rallies nor the Rose Garden photo ops typical of incumbent presidents who want to project their authority and confidence.
It’s not even clear how Biden wants to be perceived. All that’s evident is that Team Biden hates people calling him old, thinks it’s unfair that the public dislikes Bidenomics, and wants the media to focus more on Donald Trump’s threat to democracy. These are fair media criticisms, but that’s all they are; they are not an affirmative vision of why the president deserves a second term, except to stave off the other guy. Nor has this criticism actually changed how the media covers Biden. A politician without a clear persona will have one assigned to him by his enemies and onlookers—this shouldn’t surprise a career communications whiz like Dunn.
Contrast with Biden’s Democratic predecessor: Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by casting himself as a champion of the little guy fighting against a private equity plutocrat. His attacks were so blistering they prompted Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) to go on television and tell Obama to back off (because his state has a large financial sector). One could fairly accuse Obama of hypocrisy, but at least he had a persona, and one well suited to the populist moment.
Instead, Biden has leaned into the threat Trump poses to American democracy itself, implicitly claiming that it doesn’t matter who he is, since he’s the only way to stop Trump. That’s exactly what Hillary Clinton did in 2016, in a campaign that famously featured the two least popular candidates in modern American history. It should have taught Democrats that their greatest danger isn’t voters somehow not recognizing who Trump is, but voters either choosing an active figure over a reactive one, or too depressed by the choice in front of them to bother voting at all.
Other people did all of the work of generating an image of the president as cold-blooded, confident, and hyper-competent—exactly the narrative that Biden’s own team has failed to seed.
Dunn, of course, is not the only member of Biden’s inner circle to blame. For instance, an Axios story last week contrasted Biden’s current chief of staff Jeffrey Zients with his predecessor, Ron Klain. As I’ve written before, Zients is a poster boy for everything Democrats shouldn’t be associated with right now: He made billions in management consulting (i.e., getting paid to tell CEOs what they want to hear) before failing upward into a role as the go-between for corporate America and the Obama White House.
Unsurprisingly, he’s uplifted the administration’s liaisons with the C-suite and “often relays concerns from the business community,” according to Axios. One of the only issues that just about all of the public agrees on is ending big money in politics, and the president’s right-hand man is prioritizing parroting business executives. Do we see the problem here?
By contrast, Klain was one of the most prominent voices for populism in the West Wing. While hardly innocent of revolving out for big money (he’s at Airbnb now and has done BigLaw and venture capital previously), Klain had strong relationships with progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Likely as a result, Klain “often pushed to publicly hit big business as part of the White House’s political strategy, drawing the ire of many corporate America executives,” Axios writes.
You see very little of that now. When The New Yorker asked Zients whether the White House has become too insular, he pointed to Biden soliciting feedback from (1) Larry Summers, the arch-guru of neoliberal economics; (2) Thomas Friedman, the trumpeter of corporate globalization with a unit of wartime named after him; and (3) Mitch McConnell, the retiring Republican leader most infamous for stealing a Supreme Court seat from Biden’s predecessor. “That’s how you pressure-test decisions,” Zients said.
A president constantly accused of being a relic from a bygone era “pressure-tests” his decisions by consulting two reviled Davos types, symbols of the old neoliberal consensus that Trump demolished in 2016, and an evil Machiavellian schemer who has done more damage to the Democratic Party and America than anyone not named Trump. I can’t think of a worse defense to accusations of insularity.
Dunn says in that New Yorker feature, “The biggest bet of all is that good governing actually can get you reëlected in 2024, when all of the forces seem to be arrayed against it.” The feature’s author Evan Osnos then acknowledges “there is little agreement—even among Biden’s supporters—on what good governing looks like.”
That seems like a solvable problem: Look at when Biden’s poll numbers have risen throughout his first term in office, and do more of whatever caused that. By and large, it was back when they supported populist policies like canceling student debt, stimulus checks, banning noncompete clauses, and pardoning nonviolent cannabis offenses. In other words, actively doing things that help people.
To be fair, some things out of Biden’s control have dented his approval rating, like when the mainstream press savaged him over the correct decision to end the occupation of Afghanistan, and when voters blamed him for inflation stemming largely from pandemic-era disruptions.
But that’s no excuse for a White House seemingly content to sit, watch, and hope that someone else does the hard work of fighting fascists and inspiring an exhausted public for them. They’re waiting for another Dark Brandon moment to pop out of the ether, instead of going out and making it happen for themselves.
The presidency is difficult. Protecting democracy is harder than it ought to be. And it is unfair that the public feels dour about an economy stronger than it’s been in recent years. That’s what Biden signed up for when he ran for the job in the first place, and what he doubled down on when he filed for re-election. The stakes are too high for Biden, Dunn, and Zients to get tired, retreat into themselves, or prioritize their personal wealth and elite friendships over the good of the nation.
In particular, while Biden might not be able to find the Fountain of Youth, he and his team could be doing a lot more to hammer home the fact that Trump is entirely responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade, has promised to become a dictator, and is constantly spewing out lines that almost could have been copy-pasted from Mein Kampf. Recent polls show a large proportion of voters are bizarrely ignorant of these developments, likely because the mainstream press has not mentioned them. But The New York Times is not going to do what Democrats tell it to.
Actual “brawlers-in-chief” let public anger guide them to know which bridges to burn and which scars to earn for the sake of a greater good. If the president and his team are unwilling to leave it all on the field for democracy, they have guaranteed that they will fail.
