Biden’s 2020 campaign was so low-profile he was accused by his detractors of hiding in his basement. His presidency has more or less followed suit, which is all the more jarring when compared to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. Biden has given few press conferences or interviews, and he has often left major announcements to his deputies.

But since dropping out of the campaign on July 21, announced via a low-key post on X, he has been all but invisible. The lame-duck president often holds zero or just one public event on any given day, and he only spent a few hours at last month’s Democratic National Convention, speaking on the first night, then leaving immediately for a two-week vacation.

Biden has appeared on the campaign trail with Harris only a couple of times, and he instead has been pictured on the beach, in particular during the anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal, which has become a talking point in the Trump campaign.

Last week, he paid tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, shaking hands with Trump at the memorial site in New York. He subsequently made headlines for his light-hearted exchange with a Trump supporter, culminating in him jokingly donning a Trump hat.

The image was all the more jarring, however, simply because he had barely been seen.

Thanks for the support, Joe! pic.twitter.com/GeNDXWEHVi

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 11, 2024

Cabinet secretaries take on more visible presence

With Biden laying low, some wonder how the executive branch of the government (which employs more than 2 million people) is now operating. Conservatives often charge that unelected Cabinet secretaries or lower-level bureaucrats are emboldened in the absence of strong executive leadership.

Biden’s Cabinet secretaries have taken on more prominent roles during the latter stages of his presidency. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for example, was credited last month with revoking the plea agreements for the 9/11 terrorist attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed rather than Biden.

Attorney General Merrick Garland traveled with Harris to Selma, Alabama, for an event in March to speak out against voter ID laws. On Thursday, he gave a speech rejecting accusations that the Department of Justice had become weaponized.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, has been a mainstay on news networks, albeit largely talking about Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Trump has pledged to upend the federal government if elected to a second term, promising alternately to “drain the swamp” or eliminate the “deep state” of government workers whose jobs are secure regardless of who wins the presidency.

Shortly before leaving office, Trump worked to make more government workers fireable by the president, creating a classification called Schedule F that would affect about 50,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees. But Biden scrapped Schedule F upon taking office and is now working to “Trump proof” many of the jobs, indicating he’s happy with the work of those civil service employees.

Harris campaign a sign of things to come?

So far, Harris appears to be taking a leaf out of her boss’s playbook, not only eschewing interviews or press conferences but actively shunning the media in some cases from covering her campaign. Just last week, the White House News Photographers Association criticized the Harris campaign for lack of access.

The question is, will voters care? Or do they see it as a welcome contrast to the more bombastic Trump presidency that took on all comers?

“Trump was too much in our faces,” Rutgers University history, media studies, and journalism professor David Greenberg said. “But Biden has not been visible enough.”

Trump, a born showman, has dominated news headlines and political discourse since he launched his campaign in June 2015. He seemed to be everywhere all the time from the ride down the escalator to the end of his presidency. Even after Biden entered the White House, Trump often got more daily coverage as the ex-president than Biden did as the incumbent.

And many voters like it that way, Greenberg argues.

“Trump was too loud, too obnoxious, too petulant,” he said. “His daily tweets annoyed people, and the media’s amplification of them with hysterical coverage made it worse.”

However, Biden’s age-related troubles raise the question of whether his low profile was by design as a contrast to Trump or whether it was because his aides were concerned that Biden’s declining energy levels and verbal fluency would alarm the public. Either way, Greenberg argues that Biden, and now Harris, hurt themselves by not doing more press conferences and impromptu exchanges with reporters or town halls with voters.

Trump tried to make Biden’s absence a problem during his recent debate with Harris.

“Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s the president,” Trump said. “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog. We don’t even know — is he our president? We have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

Harris, rather than defending Biden, reminded Trump that he wasn’t onstage.

“It’s important to remind the former president you’re not running against Joe Biden,” she said. “You’re running against me.”

Biden will remain in office until noon on Jan. 20, 2025. If his lack of visibility doesn’t bother the voting public and Harris is elected, it’s possible she may emulate his style in office as well.

Joel Goldstein, a vice presidential scholar at Saint Louis University, cautioned that a quiet president does not necessarily mean an unproductive one, and a loud one is not necessarily more active behind the scenes.

“Biden may have paid a political price for not being a more frequent or effective communicator, or not emphasizing himself more, but that doesn’t mean he’s been inactive or ineffective as a president,” Goldstein said. “Quite the contrary.”

Similar approaches can also yield different results, Goldstein argues. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had reputations as delegators, for example, but Reagan was known as a skilled communicator much more so than Bush was.

“Trump’s omnipresence in the headlines doesn’t translate into presidential success, especially when his public comments often reveal his lack of knowledge of policy,” Goldstein said.

Biden appears to share that view, holding the fewest solo press conferences of any president dating back to George H.W. Bush. But Cully Stimson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues that the president owes it to the public to defend and explain policies and events on a regular basis.

“The president has the legal and moral authority to speak on behalf of the American people. That is a strength of the office,” he said. “The absence of that over long periods of time weakens the office of the presidency and weakens the U.S. not only in the eyes of the American people, but in the world.”

The presidency is ‘waiting for the next large person’

So, is a Biden-style quiet presidency the way of the future? Are voters content with a leader who occupies less of their headspace on a permanent basis? Craig Shirley doesn’t think so.

Shirley, a presidential historian and Reagan biographer, says the profile of the presidency correlates directly with the stature of the person occupying it.

“Do the times make the man, or does the man make the times?” he asked, paraphrasing Henry Adams. “I would say the man makes the times.”

Shirley says that books continue to be written about great presidents such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Reagan, but he predicts that a great book will never be written about the Biden presidency.

There is some early evidence to back his claim. Earlier this year, Simon and Schuster withdrew a contract it had with Axios reporter Alex Thompson for a book on the Biden White House, reportedly a “sign of the soft Biden book market.”

“Joe Biden is a man of small ideas, and so he is a small president,” Shirley said. “There are no books about Franklin Pierce or Millard Fillmore. There are no books about James Buchanan, except maybe to point out that he was a failure. Little men have little thoughts and get little books or no books at all. Joe Biden is a little man who is already forgotten.”

Shirley predicts that the presidency will remain quiet only so long as such a figure remains in office and that it will draw attention again when another big thinker enters the White House.

“The presidency is waiting for the next large person, the next dynamic person, the next person with ideas,” he said. “Interesting people get headlines, and people are interested because the person is interesting.”