A Disappearing President Steps Back Into the Limelight

For a few minutes on Thursday afternoon, President Biden stood silently onstage in Maryland, his hands folded and his body swaying ever so softly. On one side of him was Vice President Kamala Harris, heaping praise on him; hovering on the other side was Harris’s face again, emblazoned on a shirt worn by a member of the crowd.

It was the pair’s first time onstage together since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. The appearance, three and a half weeks in the making, had great potential for awkwardness: an event for the Biden White House with the vibe of a Harris campaign rally.

If it looked like Biden was living in Harris’s world now, he kept the focus on Trump.

“Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is,” Biden said, evoking a set of conservative policy plans drawn up by allies of former President Donald Trump, once he stepped to the microphone. “Beat the hell out of ’em.”

Unburdened by the weight of defending democracy in an embattled presidential campaign, Biden joked repeatedly about his age — “I served in the Senate for 270 years!” — referred to former President Trump as “Donald Dump,” and delivered a line that had bedeviled him at the debate where his candidacy unraveled.

“This time,” he said, “we finally beat big pharma.”

It was a flash of a Biden who has not been seen much since he dropped out of the presidential race on July 21. He is no longer his party’s standard-bearer. He has not appeared on the campaign trail. He seems in many ways to have shrunk from public view.

It all got me curious about what these past weeks have meant for Biden — a man who is, of course, very much still president. My colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, has watched Biden and Harris up close, and he spoke with me this afternoon from the event in Maryland. Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.