The Curious Case of the Missing President

This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today:

On Monday afternoon, Joe Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, composed a memo designed to reassure the American people. The president, who tested positive for Covid six days ago, has completed his tenth dose of Paxlovid, he wrote, and “his symptoms have almost completely resolved.” O’Connor reiterated that Biden “continues to perform all his presidential duties.”  

After that letter was released, everyone here at The Free Press still had the same question: Where the hell is the president?

If Joe Biden’s decision to step down was extraordinary, so was the manner of his announcement. At this dramatic denouement of his fifty-year career in Washington, he declared the end of his reelection bid by tweeting out a letter. Since then, nothing. Or almost nothing. Late on Monday afternoon, he phoned his former campaign headquarters, now Kamala Harris HQ. “I know yesterday’s news was surprising and hard for you to hear, but it was the right thing to do,” Biden said on the call. 

But we still haven’t seen the president in days. 

Last Wednesday, Biden flew from Las Vegas, where he had been campaigning, to his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. It was there that he isolated and stewed, alongside only his immediate family and closest advisers, and reportedly came to the decision to step down. According to the White House daily schedule, the president will reemerge this afternoon and return to Washington. 

Assuming that happens, the president’s disappearing act will be over, but it will have been a strange stretch in which Biden vanished at the most crucial moment.  

Into the void left by the amazing disappearing president appeared all manner of theories about what is going on. Some wilder than others. Was the president faking his Covid? Did Biden even sign his own announcement? Is he much sicker than his aides and doctors are letting on? Is he even. . . alive?

For some in the legacy media, the proliferation of all these “conspiracy theories” is the real concern. The Daily Beast complained that Bill Ackman had “compared Biden to [a] ‘hostage’ in [a] conspiracy rant.” For poking fun at the missing president, Donald Trump was accused by New York magazine of having a “conspiracy-theory meltdown.”  

But to me, at least, the surge in conspiracy theories isn’t as worrying as the fact we hadn’t seen the president in five whole days.

After all, if Biden isn’t well enough to face the American people, is he really well enough to “continue to perform all his presidential duties,” as his doctor claims? And with Biden isolating and Kamala booting up her own presidential campaign, who is actually running this country? 

You would think a Democratic Party facing accusations of an elite subversion of the primary process would want maximum transparency right now. Instead, Biden has passed the torch in a way that seems seedier and more suspicious than it needed to. 

Maybe Joe Biden knows all this. Maybe he is sulking. Maybe he is fully aware that his absence only makes his party look worse, and he’s reveling in the schadenfreude. But even after Biden pops up again, the case of the missing president will be another example of those in power complaining about a lack of public trust while finding new ways to make the problem worse.

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.