President Joe Biden promised when he took office that his administration would be a contrast to former President Donald Trump’s rough-and-tumble style.
Biden said the days of Trump’s “You’re Fired!” catchphrase would not return under his watch.
But a stunning new tell-all book on the Biden administration claims that is exactly what happened. Specifically, Biden threatened to root out and fire any staffer that leaked potentially harmful information on Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to the upcoming book “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” written by The New York Times journalists Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, Biden was angered that Harris’ staff was telling friends in the media they were unhappy.
Biden reportedly hauled senior staffers into the Oval Office after Harris’ Guatemala trip and threatened to purge anyone who leaked information to the press.
If “he found that any of them was stirring up negative stories about the vice president, Biden said, they would quickly be former staff.”
That’s not the only dysfunction reportedly happening behind the scenes at the White House.
Harris and Biden’s offices have become aggravated with one another. Harris has reportedly complained she has been given “impossible tasks” that are hurting her polling numbers.
“One senator close to her, describing Harris’s frustration level as ‘up in the stratosphere,’ lamented that Harris’s political decline was a ‘slow-rolling Greek tragedy,’” the book says, according to Politico. “Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden’s, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run.”
Biden’s communications director Kate Bedingfield reportedly shot back the problem was with Harris, not the president.
“In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: Her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff,” an excerpt of the book reads.
The tensions have reportedly even made their way over to the office of First Lady Jill Biden.
The first lady didn’t like President Biden choosing Harris as a running mate after she attacked him during an early 2016 Democratic presidential primary debate.
“Speaking in confidence with a close adviser to her husband’s campaign, the future first lady posed a pointed question,” the tell-all read. “There are millions of people in the United States, she began. Why, she asked, do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?”
FLASHBACK: Jill Biden shocks Kamala: “Go [expletive] yourself!”
The Horn editorial team