WSJ What’s News - How Biden’s White House Functioned With a Diminished President

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

P.M. Edition for Dec. 19. Aides and advisers stepped in to keep President Biden’s agenda on track despite the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history. WSJ investigations reporter Rebecca Ballhaus tells us how this affected his presidency. And President-elect Donald Trump endorses a new deal that House Republicans have put together in an effort to avoid a government shutdown this weekend. Plus, sales of previously owned homes in the U.S. are on track to hit the lowest level this year since 1995, even as November saw sales numbers tick up. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do airplanes fly? What's in this box? What does this thing do? Kids are curious about everything, including guns. Learn how to store your guns securely and make your home safer at nfamilyfire.org. Brought to you by N Family Fire, Brady and the Ad Council. President-elect Donald Trump endorses a new GOP plan to avert a government shutdown. And how Joe Biden's inner circle kept the president's agenda on track, even with a diminished leader in charge. Biden was more insulated than the typical president.

There were more layers around him. A broader share of the administration and of Democrats across government felt like it was difficult to get a hold of him. Plus, home sales rose in November, though the broader market is still subdued. It's Thursday, December 19th. I'm Alex Osceola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories

that move the world today. Donald Trump endorsed a new plan pulled together by House Republican leaders to try to avert a government shutdown this weekend, a day after the president-elect killed a bipartisan deal that had drawn widespread criticism from rank-and-file GOP lawmakers. Oklahoma Republican Representative Tom Cole said his party had reached a new agreement on how to proceed and that there would be a House vote later today without giving any details. Even if the measure passes the House, it would need to be approved by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Earlier, angry Democrats signaled they are in no mood to play ball after Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk yesterday torpedoed the deal House Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional leaders struck earlier this week. A Georgia appeals court removed Fulton County District Attorney Fonny Willis from her election interference prosecution against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants. The court said Willis's romantic relationship with a top deputy disqualifies her entire office and that a trial judge erred by allowing Willis to remain on the case so long. The panel stopped short of throwing out the prosecution entirely, saying dismissal was too extreme,

but it could still spell the end of the case. A spokesman for Willis didn't respond to a request for comment. In a brief court filing, Willis said she would ask the Georgia Supreme Court to review today's decision. Trump lawyer Steve Sadow called the ruling well-reasoned and just. Homebuying activity in the U.S. remained subdued for the second consecutive year. According to the National Association of Realtors, sales of previously owned homes in 2024 are on track to hit the lowest level since 1995. Still, sales of existing homes in the U.S. rose in November. It's the biggest year-over-year gain in more than three years.

Nicole Friedman covers the U.S. housing market for the Wall Street Journal and tells us what's behind the recent uptick. Mortgage rates declined throughout the summer and they hit a low of just above 6% in early September. And so that did bring some more activity into the market that some buyers who had been on the sidelines felt like they could stomach a 6% rate. And similarly, some sellers who had just been waiting and waiting to move finally felt like, okay, we'll jump in and take advantage of this moment. And so those lower rates in August and September have translated into higher home sales in October and November,

because it takes a month or two for a home sale to close. But mortgage rates since then have climbed again, and they're edging up back towards 7%. And so the expectation is that sales could become sluggish again in early 2025. News Corp, owner of the journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from NAR. In U.S. markets, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq closed down about 0.1% while the Dow rose less than 0.1%. down about 0.1 percent, while the Dow rose less than 0.1 percent. New census data released today shows that immigrants are having a huge impact on U.S. population growth.

The Census Bureau said today that newcomers accounted for 84 percent of U.S. growth in the year ended June 30. The agency now estimates the U.S. grew about 1 percent in the last year, the fastest growth since 2001. Paul Overberg is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal's data team and joins me now from Washington. So Paul, where are we seeing most of this growth geographically? Two-thirds of the immigrants who arrived in the last year, according to the Census Bureau, are in 10 states, the ones typically that you think of as immigrant gateways like California, New York, New Jersey,

but also Texas and Florida. Movement around inside the country, what we're seeing is a slowdown of the shift that was really strong during the pandemic down to the states of the sunbelt. The states that were losing population are still losing to other states, but New York and New Jersey and California are actually offsetting all their losing to other states, but New York and New Jersey and California are actually offsetting all their losses to other states with strong immigration flows. Interesting. So President-elect Donald Trump has

proposed limiting immigration and boosting deportations. How might that impact the US's ability to grow? Well, since most of the growth the country is doing these days is from immigrants, it could bring population growth to a halt. Most of these people are working, they're working-age people. So that affects especially job categories where immigrants are strong, like in construction. So that will affect things like wage rates and housing construction and prices as well. The idea is generally that as long as the population is growing, the need for goods

and services grows. And so that means more services and goods can be produced and that increases the size of the economy and profits for companies and all that sort of thing. That was Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Overberg. Coming up, how the White House functioned with a diminished Biden in charge. That's after the break. On June 27th, when President Joe Biden took the stage to debate Donald Trump, his mental acuity became an insurmountable issue.

But our reporting shows that since early on in his presidency, his closest aides and advisors had been implementing strategies to work around the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office. Some administration officials and lawmakers said these tactics kept Biden insulated even as they kept his agenda on track. Wall Street Journal investigations reporter Rebecca Bauhaus is here to tell us more. Rebecca, so these workarounds,

how have they affected Biden's presidency? Many of the people that we spoke to talked about this model of Biden having a sort of very tight core inner circle around him, and that it was very difficult to penetrate this inner circle. His advisors told visitors to keep meetings focused, interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members, including powerful ones such as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were infrequent or grew less frequent.

Biden has always operated with a core set of advisors around him. That's how he likes to organize his offices ever since he was senator. In addition to that, he took office when COVID was raging. And as the oldest president in US history, his staff was very concerned about him catching the virus and they wanted to limit in-person interactions with him. But what we saw was that that shell that was sort of constructed for the pandemic was really never fully taken down and his advanced age and the power that he had attained hardened it. How typical really is this for a president?

Because I imagine like, yeah, presidents are busy, they're hard to reach, their meetings are short and they're focused. Is this atypical? It's a great question. Many parts of this, there are certainly typical, you know, of course you're meeting with the president, of course you should keep the meeting focused. Of course, not everybody who wants the president's time can get his time. What people who have worked for Biden's administration, but also for previous administration said was just that everything was more so in this one. One of the things I found interesting in the piece was about Washington Democratic Congressman Adam Smith. He tried to share concerns with Biden before

the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. What happened there? Smith was at the time the chair of the House Armed Services Committee and he was concerned because he believed that the Biden administration and Biden specifically was making overly optimistic comments about how the operation might go. He tried to speak to Biden directly to share his insights about the region, but he just could not get on the phone with Biden.

And in the end, he ended up publicly making some criticisms of how the pullout had been handled. He got an angry phone call from the Secretary of State, and it seems like he sort of gave it right back to him. And in the end, Biden called him to apologize. And it's the only phone call that Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, which is a pretty remarkable detail. How has the White House responded to our reporting?

The White House all along has maintained that Biden is in great health. They say he's not declining, that he has a very accomplished record as president, that he often solicits opinions from outside experts, that it's normal for senior White House staff to have these sorts of high-level meetings and that they're just executing Biden's agenda at his direction. So they're very much playing down the degree to which any of this is unusual and are saying this is just how any standard administration operates.

That was Rebecca Bauhaus, an investigations reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thousands of Amazon workers have gone on strike during the busy run-up to Christmas. They're striking over contract negotiations and the company's refusal to recognize their union. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents the Amazon employees, called the action the largest-ever strike against Amazon by U.S. workers. Amazon said the strike wasn't expected to affect operations and branded the action as an illegal public relations play.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a month-long ban on flying drones over critical infrastructure in parts of New Jersey. The move comes after a string of unexplained drone sightings in the state. Media companies in the U.S. are making bets on TikTok at a time when the future of the platform itself is in question. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— In October and November, 51 of the top 150 political TikTok accounts in the U.S. were publishers like the New York Times, MSNBC, Fox, and CNN. Isabella Simonetti covers the business of television and streaming and explained to

our tech news briefing podcast why media companies are investing time and effort in a platform that could soon be banned in the U.S. It's about the format more than it's about the platform. A lot of the work that these companies are doing on TikTok can be easily translated to other vertical video platforms like Instagram Reels. And TikTok right now is so huge. And even if a 25-year-old or a 26-year-old sees a Fox News TikTok or an MSNBC TikTok and then TikTok is banned, they might then look to follow them on another platform or keep up

with their work elsewhere. It's about trying to grasp viewers where they are now more than it is thinking years and years ahead about the strategy because no one knows what the future of TikTok's going to be. Fox News parent Fox Corp. and the Wall Street Journal's parent company News Corp. share common ownership. And you can hear more about this story in today's episode of our tech news briefing podcast.

And that's what's news for this Thursday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienamay and Anthony Bansi, with supervising producer Michael Kosmitis. I'm Alex Osila for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.