No one outside his inner circle knows now what Joe Biden is really doing or who’s running this doomed presidential administration through all these rudderless, dangerous days into 2025. 

Biden is so cloistered he hasn’t even talked with longtime pal Nancy Pelosi since his ouster, which she claims she had nothing to do with. LOL.

Is the 81-year-old angry, depressed, sullen, or all three, perhaps mentally worse over losing what he and Jill thought they had locked up? And how's she to be around now?

The White House still puts out the president’s alleged daily schedule. It’s even lighter than it was before his disappearance, one event per day for the lifetime politician. And it's a passive activity.

According to Joe Biden’s office, Joe Biden is taking a break from doing nothing. He’s in his Delaware beach house, where he has spent about 40 percent of his first and last term on vacation. 

Biden is said to sit for a daily intelligence briefing. Not the kind he needs, but one about world events, including the warring Mideast and Ukraine. This raises all kinds of questions for my colleague Nick Arama.

Meanwhile, his former assistant, Kamala Harris, who really does need intelligence briefings, is flying high above all the unimportant states to make highly controlled campaign appearances in key swing states.

Here’s what she told one union rally:

You know the one thing about all of us? Is we like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is good work. The thing that we like about hard work is we have fun doing hard work!

What that actually means we’ll never know because Harris is following the updated Official Presidential Communications Playbook of Joe Biden. He’s the president with the fewest media interactions of any modern chief executive. And it has shown in his job approval.

So, three weeks into the media’s orgy of enthusiasm with something new in an otherwise endless, formerly boring election campaign, Kamala Harris has done no news conferences.

And there’s been no squawking about access from the sympathetic media.

Meanwhile, to draw a contrast about openness, Trump held another news conference in Florida.

It’s an interesting kind of Catch-22 for the country that lacks a sense of presidential leadership from someone: Biden can’t use the bully pulpit because of his cognitive decline. Harris can’t use it because of her intellectual flat-line. Trump can use it brilliantly, but half the country hates his pugnacious style.

This is not good for voters who want to see how wannabe presidents think, speak, and answer spontaneous questions. With Biden safely ensconced in his basement in 2020, voters fell for his damaged goods. (See Biden’s mental implosion in the June 27 debate that destroyed his candidacy, which really should have been aborted months before. Or never launched.)

It’s actually smart politically for Harris to take this advice from aides. She’s gliding along on millions of dollars in free media attention (as Trump did in 2015-16) during her political honeymoon, which she hopes folds right into another week of positive convention attention.

Why risk that momentum to do her first sit-down interview since June 24 on MSNBC? 

That’s because her unscripted remarks or spontaneous responses are almost always full of words but empty of coherent meaning. They sound like a fourth-grader bluffing through a lesson she didn’t actually read.

Here, a condescending Harris patiently explains to an obviously ignorant audience how she understands computer memories actually work:

So, no longer are you necessarily keeping those private files in some file cabinet that’s locked in the basement of the house. It’s on your laptop and it’s then therefore up here in this Cloud that exists above us, right. It’s no longer in a physical place.

As a safeguard, Harris speaks in public only with a teleprompter or script, not a realistic expectation for a real president. The one time she didn’t — on the Russian prisoners’ return — she simply lavished praise on Biden. 

Brit Hume summed up the Harris challenge:

If VP Harris were a confident, competent candidate well-prepared to be president, she would be willing, even eager, to outline her plans and explain herself to inquiring journalists. But she is not. She appears afraid she'll remind people why so many came to regard her as a…

— Brit Hume (@brithume) August 9, 2024

If VP Harris were a confident, competent candidate well-prepared to be president, she would be willing, even eager, to outline her plans and explain herself to inquiring journalists. But she is not. She appears afraid she'll remind people why so many came to regard her as a giggling lightweight.

What Harris does out of sight to defuse media frustrations is go back on the campaign plane and schmooze with reporters off the record. That’s her security blanket that masks any goofs.

That media are younger these days, unversed in history, eager to be involved, and seemingly in-the-know with potentially the first female commander in chief. She’ll ask if aides are taking good care of them, if they need anything. Their questions will tip her to what's on media's mind and she can prepare answers for public use.

So far, that’s helped to mute loud conservative criticism over her failure to take spontaneous questions and the lack of media unhappiness.

The one time she’s answered a shouted query about Tim Walz’s stolen-valor issue, she simply and smartly said: "I praise anyone who has presented themselves to serve our country, and I think we all should." 

For the moment, that effectively snuffed any follow-up that could have prolonged coverage of that sensitive topic about her VP partner ducking out of military service once his unit got deployed. 

A later campaign statement with no attribution to discourage follow-up said Walz “misspoke” when he claimed to have carried a weapon in combat. Misspeaking has been a common Biden-Harris affliction.

Because of his mental infirmities, aides only sent Biden back in the plane twice. Harris does it to cover her intelligence gap. George W. Bush, for instance, did it regularly and confidently often on the record, which showcased his casual side.

In public, Biden had some good days. Remember the March State of the Union Address when 32 million viewers saw him shout and point and whisper, seemingly in control, even in the evening?

Supporters could point to those times, until they became less frequent. Then came The Debate, where his problems were so visible and, finally, undeniable to 55 million Americans, including donors and D.C. Democrats. And many others viewing clips later.

Theoretically, everyone knows the importance of a president’s bully pulpit, his ability to command attention to a subject, an event, his position. But only in its absence is the true power revealed.

Trump knows the power of publicity from his real estate and reality-TV days. And he used media access as president, often several times a day to get a message out and drown out Democrats.

Often, Trump did it out of his own desire for attention, which media loved and often used against him. That could, however, be clumsy and hand media a fresh issue to hype, which distracted from the administration’s designated message of the week. With his frequent feuds and “punching back” adding to an overall sense of turmoil and lack of discipline.

Trump, as I wrote last Sunday, seems taken aback by Harris’ early success and polling spurt, abandoning his elevated President Trump mode for an angrier persona, which he could reasonably leave to JD Vance. 

Trump and Harris will debate Sept. 10, which will be crucial for both.

There’s 12 weeks to go, ample time for the former president to regain momentum, though some early voting starts 46 days before Nov. 5.

The more urgent issue is to assemble ample evidence to define the Harris-Walz duo as far-left extremists tied to the Biden-Harris record on the economy/inflation and, above all, to the ongoing surge of some 10 million illegal immigrants since Biden appointed Harris as border czar to do nothing.

Personally, I think their energy policies are inviting targets. Harris has backed off her adamant opposition to fracking. But that pair is directly responsible for: 

• Smothering the country’s hard-won energy independence 
• Halting new drilling leases 
• Jacking gas prices for everyday drivers 
• Dangerously draining the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves 
• Squandering the sale proceeds
• Stalling the promised refill

And they killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have been delivering 800,000 barrels of Canadian oil to Texas daily by now.

As everyone knows, though, we don’t need that energy anymore because Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have decreed that in a few years everyone will be waiting in long lines to charge their electric cars on an overwhelmed power grid.