WASHINGTON — As President Biden and first lady Jill Biden participated in their tradition of reading “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” to patients and families at Children’s National Hospital on Friday, a few miles away at the Capitol, ‘twas the eve of something else.
The government he is in charge of was teetering on the verge of a shutdown.
And while many creatures were stirring over this development — President-elect Donald Trump chief among them — Biden was not.
The president kept quietly to the sidelines as Trump and his ally Elon Musk torpedoed a bipartisan deal to fund the government and other priorities days before the deadline. As House Speaker Mike Johnson began scrambling on Wednesday for a last-minute solution that could pass his chamber, the Democratic-controlled Senate, and satisfy Trump, the man with actual veto power over any bill did not make any public statements about the situation.
Between the Capitol Hill drama and the angry missives from Mar-a-Lago and Musk posts on X, the GOP infighting nearly drowned out something significant: that Biden’s disengagement, as much as anything, was a symbolic marker of the close of his time in power, and the dawn of Trump’s.
Beyond his public silence, no indication emerged that Biden was aggressively working behind the scenes to head off a shutdown that Trump explicitly wanted to blame on him. It was only on Friday morning that the White House confirmed Biden had just spoken by phone with the two Democratic congressional leaders, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries.
When asked during her Friday briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to answer if Biden had spoken with Johnson, though she said White House officials had been in close contact with congressional leaders.
It’s possible Biden and his team deliberately sat back to keep the focus on Republicans’ internal disagreements and the chaos injected by Trump, which dominated headlines and sparked questions about how the second Trump administration might govern.
Pressed repeatedly on Biden’s absence from what is likely the last major legislative fight of his presidency, Jean-Pierre responded each time by asserting that Republicans had created the “mess” and had to fix it. And she insisted there was nothing new about the president’s hands-off approach.
“This is a strategy we have done many times before,” she said.
Democratic congressional leaders have played lead roles in shaping recent spending and budgetary fights, but Biden has at least been somewhat vocal in some of them. In October 2023, after yet another frenzied effort to pass a stopgap funding resolution at the last minute, Biden chided House Republicans: “Enough is enough is enough.”
Notably, the situation this week developed as Biden was in Delaware on Wednesday to observe the anniversary of the tragic death of his first wife and daughter 52 years ago. Reporters were unable to ask him about the spending fight when he returned to Washington on Thursday, nor were they given a chance to ask him as he traveled to the hospital on Friday for his only public appearance since the spending plan first blew up.
On a practical level, there’s no indication whether Biden’s disengagement affected the outcome of the fight. On Friday evening, the GOP-led House, with near-unanimous Democratic help, finally managed to pass a new version of the bill to fund the government until March, along with widely desired funds for disaster aid and farm relief. Democrats did express some disappointment with the legislation that resulted, however, even if the prospect of a shutdown grew more unlikely. The Senate was expected to approve the legislation quickly, which would avert any serious shutdown impacts even if they did not pass it right before midnight.
But the president’s silence amid a stretch with consequential stakes for the federal government will likely further underscore the narrative that he has faded from the office and the bully pulpit of the presidency since Trump’s victory on Nov. 5.
Biden has been scarcer than usual in public during the lame duck period, even as his top White House aides vowed to make use of the remainder of their time in office to push through his agenda. He has given few extensive post-election comments, save for interviews with friendly interlocutors, such as the anti-Trump media brand Meidas Touch and a left-leaning outlet run by a top adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. During two international trips in the past month, one to South American countries and one to Angola, Biden did not once speak with the press.
Trump, meanwhile, has gleefully seized the void, seeking to effectively act as president well before he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. Traveling to Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral, he was hailed by foreign leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, as something of an incumbent.
Until Wednesday, however, there was no indication Trump was intending to exercise any de facto veto power over year-end spending legislation — much less a package negotiated by Johnson, his close ally. But when conservative backlash grew over provisions in the bill, thanks in large part to flatly incorrect claims made by Musk, the president-elect threw the process into chaos by declaring his opposition and vowing to “primary” any GOP lawmaker who crossed him.
To make matters more complicated, Trump insisted Congress add a two-year suspension of the debt ceiling so he wouldn’t have to deal with the fraught political football as president.
The reason Trump gave was clear: he wanted to stick Biden with one last indignity. “Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Trump said in a joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance.
As Republicans revolted over that demand and tanked a Trump-backed bill Thursday, Trump attempted to embrace a shutdown, so long as Biden took the blame.
“If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden Administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP,’ ” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”
The president did not respond himself, giving ammunition to his GOP critics. “Where is the 46th president right now? What is he saying about this?” said Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, according to NBC News. “I have not heard him weigh in one ounce over the last month.”
The White House weighed in plenty, if not Biden. On Thursday night, Jean-Pierre issued a statement torching the Trump-backed resolution, which made significant changes to the initial bipartisan legislation, as a “giveaway for billionaires.”
During her Friday press briefing, Jean-Pierre repeatedly noted that Republicans blew up the deal that was on track to pass, insisting it was Trump and Johnson’s problem to solve. Reporters continued to ask why it was that she, and not Biden, was making those arguments and talking about the disastrous impacts of a shutdown.
At one point, a reporter asked a blunt question. “In this moment, is the president leading?”
“The president is the president of the United States,” Jean-Pierre replied, “and he is leading.”
Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com. Follow him @sambrodey.