Joe Biden is “struggling to cash in on his presidency,” with former Democratic allies keeping their distance and organizations “reluctant” to pay for his speaking fees, according to a new report.
“Biden, 82 years old, is charting a postpresidency that is less lucrative than what he’d expected when he left office,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. “Options for big jobs are limited by his advanced age, his unpopularity in Democratic circles and companies—concerned about retribution from President Trump—that aren’t offering speaking gigs.”
“The result for Biden,” the report goes on, “is a leaner next chapter that lacks the well-funded foundations, plans for exquisite libraries and full calendar of paid speeches his peers enjoyed.” The former president has been spotted on commercial flights and Amtrak instead of private jets, and few people, companies, or organizations are willing to pay for his speaking fees, which can range from $300,000 to $500,000, according to the Journal.
Unlike how former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spent their post-presidential summers, Biden “spent his first Independence Day out of the White House at a high-end trailer park” in Malibu, where he and former first lady Jill Biden stayed at a mobile home owned by a friend of Hunter Biden’s, the Journal reported.
This is far from the first time that reports have pointed to Joe Biden’s tightening finances and waning popularity within the Democratic Party since his exit from public office. The Biden family “needs a source of revenue,” journalist Mark Halperin said in May. “The trough is empty, the spigot has shut down. They need a way to get back in the game to make big money to have the grandchildren fed and clothed and flown first-class.”
Biden is struggling to persuade even longtime donors and bundlers to fund his presidential library, according to a Friday report. In July, Biden sold his presidential memoir’s publishing rights for around $10 million, falling millions of dollars short of the sums that Obama and Clinton received for their memoirs.
As the Journal noted, Biden’s own allies “have grown critical of his presidency, most recently former Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a new book says the Democratic Party was reckless to allow Biden to run a second time.” Harris’s book also accuses Biden’s inner circle of sabotaging her, according to an excerpt published Wednesday, leading former White House aides to blast her as “simply not good at the job.”
Erstwhile Biden supporters snubbed the former president earlier this year, when he sought to reinsert himself into party politics. While Biden privately told Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin that he would help the party “regain its viability” and revitalize its tarnished brand, the effort “seems to have fallen flat,” NBC reported in March.
“Who’s going to want Joe Biden back in the game?” an anonymous ex-Biden supporter told NBC.
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