Biden’s Big Decision & Trump vs. DeSantis

Happy Juneteenth and welcome to the first official edition of The Washington Mall, my newsletter for Puck focused on what’s really going on in this town—in the White House, on the Hill, on K Street, and within the media covering it all.
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Good evening,

Happy Juneteenth and welcome to the first official edition of The Washington Mall, my newsletter for Puck focused on what’s really going on in this town—in the White House, on the Hill, on K Street, and within the media covering it all. Thanks to you for joining this elite community. You will now need to subscribe to Puck to read my work. Please do so here.

In today’s email, I focus on the real internal deliberations within the White House, where it’s ostensibly all-guns-ablaze for 2024, but some aides are wondering when Biden will announce, and if he will get second thoughts. But first, some fascinating reporting on the evolving feud between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Kamala Harris’s latest fundraising headache, and a Mar-a-Lago mystery.

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Biden Time

Inside the White House, aides are marching forward, preparing to launch Biden’s bid for re-election. But the timing remains uncertain, as do an increasing number of questions surrounding when the Bidens will announce, and if the president wants to protect his family from the impending chaos.

TARA PALMERI

Joe Biden has a lot to think about, as usual. Biden, who has spent the past half century in public life, is famously ponderous and contemplative, particularly when it comes to his career and family. As early as 2011, he talked openly about a potential bid for the presidency in 2016, only to back off as the date neared. Heartsick over the tragic death of his late son Beau, Biden agonized about the possibility of launching a campaign until almost a year before the general election, ending, as CNN put it at the time, “months of intense speculation about his political future.” Even during the last presidential cycle, Biden dragged out his deliberation process seemingly as long as possible before making his formal announcement in April 2019. “Joe Biden Announces 2020 Run For President, After Months of Hesitation,” ran The Times headline in characteristically arch style.

Normally, a sitting president chooses to announce their decision to run for re-election sometime after the midterms. And this is, by all appearances, the plan for Biden, too. White House aides are carrying on preparations for his big announcement, which would typically come during sometime between November and January. Staffers have been told to arrange for Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign, while his inner circle works out details like when and where they will officially announce it. “There is no daylight between whether he’s running [or not],” a senior White House official told me recently. “We are operating that way.”

And yet this very same official acknowledged to me that this could all be “busy work.” Indeed, Biden’s political future appears more tenuous than ever before. His approval ratings remain mired at 39 percent, and the media has begun to openly question his bonafides in the face of either a rematch with Donald Trump or a battle with a younger candidate, like Ron DeSantis...

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