President Donald Trump has already become one of the “most accessible” presidents in modern history after former President Joe Biden had been largely hidden from the press, according to numbers calculated by Politico.
Trump has participated in media appearances on 111 of the 138 days he has been back in office, giving him an 80% media hit rate, according to Politico Playbook. The president’s easy accessibility is a stark contrast from Biden, who held the fewest number of press conferences in modern times and had been hidden from the press by his aides to hide his cognitive decline, according to “Original Sin,” a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
Trump has noticeably taken a long list of questions from reporters at a variety of different outlets. In February, he responded to 1,009 questions from journalists in his first month in office, which was seven times the amount of questions answered by Biden in that same period.
The president has held 5 press conferences in the past four months of his second term, while Biden held 4 in his final full year in office, according to the American Presidency Project. Biden’s average number of press conferences add up to 9.25 per year, while most presidents have held over 20 per year.
During the few times Biden held a press conference, his aides handed him notecards that instructed him on which reporters to call on and how to behave during the event.
The former president’s staff often escorted him out of public events without him taking questions from reporters. His aides, cabinet secretaries and Democrat lawmakers all witnessed Biden’s physical and mental decline, but did not address it publicly in order to help him win reelection in the 2024 election, according to Tapper and Thompson’s book.
The public often raised questions about Biden’s health when he did make public appearances, including a moment from September 2022 when he searched for a deceased congresswoman. Footage also showed him fall on multiple occasions and appear confused about where he was.
Biden reportedly did not recognize his longtime acquaintance, Hollywood actor George Clooney, at a political fundraiser in June 2024, which reportedly left Clooney “shaken to the core” by what he saw.
The former president’s personal physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, privately warned Biden’s team that a “wheelchair might be necessary” if he suffered from one more fall in 2023 or 2024, Axios first reported. He had expressed concern about the toll the presidency was taking on the 81-year-old president’s health and often pushed his staff to add more rest time to his schedule.
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