President Joe Biden’s final year in office took a turn after a poor debate performance left his party scrambling to find a path forward months ahead of the 2024 election.
As Biden closes out more than 50 years of public service, including 36 years as a senator, eight as vice president, and four as president, the last year in office proved fateful in some of his longest-held friendships.
Here are four friends Biden reportedly lost last year:
Two top aides
The debate, in which Biden’s often rambling answers and confused facial expressions gave Democrats grave cause for concern about the future of his candidacy, left some of Biden’s relationships with his top advisers fractured.
Biden is reportedly resentful of several former aides, including two of his most loyal advisers — his personal attorney, Bob Bauer, and his wife, Anita Dunn. In the fallout of his nightmare performance with President-elect Donald Trump, Biden has pushed both Bauer and Dunn out of his inner circle, complaining that they failed him and then helped shunt him out of the contest, several people familiar with the relationships told NBC News.
Biden reportedly has not spoken to Dunn in months. She departed the White House over the summer in the fallout of Biden’s debate performance.
Biden’s relationship with Bauer has also soured since the debate, and it became additionally strained due to his son Hunter Biden’s legal troubles.
Bauer and Dunn did not attend a large black-tie dinner the Bidens hosted in November to thank their longtime supporters.
Bauer will no longer represent Joe Biden once he leaves office, according to NBC.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi
At the beginning of 2024, Biden honored Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) by awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Biden, at the time, said she would be remembered as the “greatest speaker of the House of Representatives in history.”
“She used her superpower to pass some of the most significant laws in our nation’s history,” Biden said last May. “On Jan. 6, Nancy stood in the breach, defending democracy. … Nancy is a brilliant, practical, principled, and determined leader.”
Six months later, Pelosi’s star had fallen, and first lady Jill Biden, in particular, appears to be more disappointed with her former friend than ever.
“We were friends for 50 years,” Jill Biden told the Washington Post about her frustrations with Pelosi leading the charge to remove her husband from the top of the party’s ticket.
Before the election and shortly after the president dropped out, Pelosi told the New Yorker she had concerns about the election and Joe Biden’s chance of winning. She emphasized she remained focused on keeping Trump out of office, noting any actions she took were to ensure “that Donald Trump would never set foot in the White House again.”
“But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen,” she said. “The president has to make the decision for that to happen. People were calling. I never called one person. I kept true to my word. Any conversation I had, it was just going to be with him. I never made one call. They said I was burning up the lines, I was talking to [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)]. I didn’t talk to Chuck at all.”
Former President Barack Obama
The feud between Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama has simmered for years.
After pulling Biden out of the Senate to put him in the White House, Obama passed over anointing him as the successor to their eight years in power, opting instead to back former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The snub has reportedly been a point of contention between the two men.
Hard feelings brewing beneath the surface came back when it appeared Obama had an invisible hand moving pieces around to coordinate Biden’s removal from the ticket last summer.
The incredibly popular former president was linked to George Clooney’s decision to write an op-ed in the New York Times that was credited as being a final blow to Biden’s candidacy.
Months later, some of that frustration might have shown when Obama’s name didn’t appear on a list of awardees for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Biden recently named aircraft carriers after former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but he did not extend the naming to his one-time boss.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
One former top Obama aide, Ben Rhodes, made note of that this week.
“Barack H. Obama did not get a f***ing personnel carrier named after him,” Rhodes said on the podcast Pod Save The World.