Joe Biden has largely stayed out of the public eye since announcing he was stepping down from the presidential election race, and has cancelled several political trips that were planned for this week.
The 81-year-old is to remain US President for about six months before his successor is inaugurated, leading to questions over his ability to govern the country while effectively a “lame duck”.
It is a term normally used to describe the final months of a president’s second term, or the period between the election in November and inauguration of the new president in the following January.
“With Biden, it is quite early for a president to be a lame duck, certainly in the modern era this is pretty unprecedented,” Dr Peter Finn, senior lecturer in politics at Kingston University, told i.
There are signs the former front-runner for Democratic nominee may choose to maintain a low profile in the coming months, having spent nearly a week recovering from Covid-19 at his beach house in Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden is expected to deliver a speech on Wednesday from the Oval Office on his decision to end his re-election campaign and outline his plans for the rest of his time in office. He said he will address “what lies ahead, and how I will finish the job for the American people”, in a post on X.
The President landed in Washington on Tuesday – the first time he had been seen in public since he ended his presidential campaign on Sunday and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
He had initially been expected to travel to Washington on Monday, according to media reports, and to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day after.
Biden has cancelled a fundraising trip to Texas, California and Colorado that had been planned this week, according to the The New York Times, presumably to be rescheduled by the Harris campaign.
If he does decide to see out the rest of his term in a similar low-key manner, it could benefit him and Harris, Dr Finn believes.
“Maybe he just doesn’t need to [go on the campaign trail],” he said. “There’s a difference between public events and governing – if he doesn’t need to use up his time and effort campaigning, then he can put his time and effort into governing.
“At the moment, the Harris campaign might be happy for him to just take a back seat but still plug her campaign as and when.”
Dr Finn suggested Biden could make his next high-profile appearance at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, where he will “probably make some pointed interventions but let Kamala Harris take the limelight”.
With numerous foreign policy matters to tackle before the end of his term – from Russia’s war in Ukraine to the Gaza conflict – Biden’s team has signalled the President is far from being a spent force in world affairs.
“He has restored US leadership around the world and delivered historic accomplishments as President,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote on X. “I look forward to building on that record with him over the next six months.”
Biden will reportedly head to Austin, Texas, on Monday to deliver a speech at the LBJ Presidential Library, a trip that was postponed from earlier this month.
The library named after former president Lyndon B Johnson is an apt setting for Biden. Like the current president, Johnson stunned Americans when he announced in March 1968 that he was not running for re-election that year.
Both faced immense pressure stemming from their policies on international conflicts – in Johnson’s case, the hugely unpopular Vietnam war – and the potential of other candidates within the party.
“I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office … the presidency of your country,” Johnson said in his speech to the nation from the Oval Office.
Since then, no incumbent president eligible to run again has stepped away from seeking a second term – until now.
“Another common denominator will be that both boldly stepped aside – perhaps against their instincts to cling to the presidency – for the good of the country and their party,” said American author and historian Mark Updegrove.