Drudge hits ‘mute’ on Biden

By Max Tani, Alex Thompson and Tina Sfondeles

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The Drudge Report made its name by making life hell for Democrats in the White House.

But over the past several months, the website, named after its infamous and enigmatic founder MATT DRUDGE, has continued the surprising trend that emerged during the 2020 presidential campaign: Taking a relatively muted editorial stance on JOE BIDEN.

Readers who visited Drudge on the morning of Dec. 10, found a patriotic graphic of Biden splashed against an American flag leading the site. Headlines on that day touted the “lowest jobless claims in 50 years,” “Biden delivering fastest recovery in history?” and quotes from CNBC host JIM CRAMER saying the economy was the “strongest I’ve ever seen.” On Dec. 21, the site linked to a report about former President DONALD TRUMP’s relationship with convicted sex offender JEFFREY EPSTEIN while promoting a story about Biden’s new dog and the record-setting pace at which Biden was confirming judicial appointees.

“I’ve noticed this change,” said TRACY SEFL, the Democratic operative who served as the HILLARY CLINTON 2008 campaign’s Drudge envoy. “But to be honest, it is only after I’m asked about it.”

Drudge isn’t a Biden cheerleader. There are still plenty of stories on the site that cast the president in a negative light. Opinion polls reflecting negatively on the president or members of his administration, including Vice President KAMALA HARRIS, regularly get top billing.

The site has also blasted Biden’s vaccine mandates (one headline on a vaccine booster story from November asked, “Will It Ever End!”). The conservative media recluse also has not spared Biden from his focus on the health of aging political figures: The president’s physical health and public bouts of coughing tend to get splashed across the top of the page.

But the site’s relative disinterest in the president is notable. The news aggregator didn’t mention Biden by name in any link on the site on Friday morning even as he described the jobs numbers as missing expectations. It was at least the second time in the past month that Drudge didn’t have any links directly mentioning the president, according to a West Wing Playbook review.

By contrast, web archives of Drudge at the end of Obama’s first year in office featured numerous links to negative and sensationalized stories about the then-president. Top headlines from November and December 2009 touted stories like: “Obama ecstasy pills hit streets in Texas”; Obama’s “frightening insensitivity following shooting”; and “'Welcome to Obamaville' Sign Marks Colorado Homeless Tent City.”

At the tail end of the first year of Trump’s presidency, meanwhile, the Drudge Report was filled daily with links to news about the 45th president. On certain days, there would be more than a dozen stories about Trump, his family, and members of his White House team.

Often, the coverage was unkind. For reasons that are still unclear, the longtime conservative news recluse soured on Trump (who returned the favor) during the 2020 presidential campaign — either deliberately or inadvertently helping Biden’s campaign against the sitting president. The relationship hasn’t seemed to improve over the last year either.

There isn’t any special relationship between the Biden camp and Drudge. Occasionally during the early parts of the 2020 campaign, the Biden team flagged stories for Drudge that they hoped he would highlight. But West Wing Playbook was told this was not a regular occurrence, and another source familiar with those exchanges said they were unaware of any current line of communication between Drudge and the White House.

In the years after making his name as the blogger who broke the BILL CLINTON affair in 1998, Drudge created a web ecosystem that drove massive traffic to largely negative stories about Democrats. Reporters and editors at news organizations, salivating at the traffic his links drove to stories, responded by coming up with headlines and story ideas in hopes he would bite.

The Obama White House was concerned enough about Drudge that it at one point released a video pushing back against a report on the site about the then-president’s position on private health insurance. They loathed how the site shifted journalists’ focus toward what they saw bizarre and conspiratorial stories.

“There's no question Drudge fueled and promulgated the most nefarious conspiracies in Obama's presidency,” said former Obama White House deputy press secretary ERIC SCHULTZ. “That's to be expected from a known right-wing website that is not shy about its agenda. The sad part was when mainstream reporters took the bait.

But like many other publishers , Drudge has struggled to keep audiences interested following the traffic sugar high of the Trump administration.

Drudge undoubtedly maintains a large and loyal readership for a site that basically hasn’t changed aesthetically since its inception. But by most standards, it simply isn’t the same traffic juggernaut it was. Data shared with POLITICO by the media analytics firm Comscore shows at least one month this year where Drudge dipped under one million unique visitors, a far cry from the millions of readers who frequented the site during the Trump presidency.

“I’m not paying the same attention to the site I once needed to, its value is greatly reduced for me and many others,” said Sefl. “Inside a cable newsroom I know it’s different, but the Drudge thumb is simply not pressing as hard on the news cycle scale.”

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From the University of Virginia’s Miller Center

Which president suffered from Bright's disease during his single term?

(Answer at the bottom.)

Cartoon | Kevin Kal Kallaugher/The Economist

It’s cartoon feature Friday! This one is courtesy of KEVIN KAL KALLAUGHER. Our very own MATT WUERKER also publishes a selection of cartoons from all over the country. View the cartoon carousel here.

NEVER TWEET — Vice President KAMALA HARRIS’ new communications director, JAMAL SIMMONS, is catching some Twitter fire for his 2010 tweet: “Just saw 2 undocumented folks talking on MSNBC. One Law student the other a protester. Can someone explain why ICE is not picking them up?” Trump immigration architect STEPHEN MILLER trolling-ly approved of Simmons’ old tweet, writing: “I agree with @JamalSimmons. If you break into our nation there must be deportation.”

In a statement to West Wing Playbook, Simmons said: “As a pundit for much of my career I have tweeted a lot and spoken out on public issues. Sometimes I have been sarcastic, unclear, or just plainly missed the mark. I sincerely apologize for offending those who care as much as I do about making America the best, multi-ethnic, diverse democracy it can be.”

Simmons later took to Twitter to defend himself again : “For the record, I've never advocated for, nor believed that Dreamers should be targeted by ICE agents. I've been for DACA + comprehensive immigration reform for years. Frankly, it's depressing ppl can forget about every other thing I've said in public on this bc of bad tweets.”

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: Chief of Staff RON KLAIN is having a mind meld with liberal NYT columnist PAUL KRUGMAN . He shared his second Krugman column this week with the headline, “The Economic Case for Goldilocks.”

Krugman argues that inflation is bad but substantially less inflation would have also hurt the job market. ”We ran what was in effect a Goldilocks economy, one that was neither too cold nor too hot,” he wrote.

“Goldilocks,” Klain tweeted.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: This Wall Street Journal story by RUTH SIMON on the economic disruptions caused by the spread of the Omicron variant.

“Hundreds of first responders in Los Angeles are out sick or quarantined due to Covid-19,” she writes. “A hotel staffing company is flying housekeepers to Florida and Texas to fill in for absent staff. A medical laboratory in Denver doesn’t have enough staff to send people to nursing homes to take blood samples….More than five million Americans could be stuck at home isolating over the coming days, according to Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics.”

NEW YEARS RESOLUTION — AP reporter DARLENE SUPERVILLE pressed principal deputy press secretary KARINE JEAN PIERRE on Biden’s lack of interviews over the first year–far fewer than his recent predecessors, POLITICO’s NICK NIEDZWIADEK noted.

Jean Pierre suggested things may be different this year. “This is the first year, and this has been an unprecedented [year]. If we're going to look at this in a full lens, this has not been a normal year. And so there will be more to come," she said.

‘I CAN SEE THE CAPITOL FROM MY HOUSE’ — Labor Secretary MARTY WALSH admitted on Bloomberg TV this morning that he doesn’t have a place in Washington — but swears to God he’s there often, pointing this out during an interview: “You can see the Capitol behind me today.”

We wrote in November that Walsh stays at the Capital Hilton, a few blocks from the White House, when he’s in town, which we noted was an atypical living arrangement for a Cabinet member. His primary residence is in Boston, Mass., where he was previously mayor. And he’s weighing a run for governor of the state this year.

On Bloomberg today, Walsh said he’s in D.C.often and doesn’t understand the fuss about a lack of rented living space: “I don’t know why that became such a big issue. I guess I can live where I want to live when I’m down in D.C.” Walsh also said he’ll “live in Boston the rest of my life.” (h/t Bloomberg Law’s REBECCA RAINEY)

CYBER POLITICS: ANNE NEUBERGER, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, gets a big profile by Bloomberg’s WILLIAM TURTON. As cyber becomes more a focus of the federal government, the bureaucratic turf battles are heating up.

“The president brought Neuberger into the White House last January, but she was on the job only a few months before the Senate confirmed CHRIS INGLIS, a former mentor of hers, as the country’s first national cyber director. Inglis, who reports directly to the president, immediately became a rival power center.”

“It created an awkward situation from having nobody in charge of cyber to having two people in charge of cyber,” JOHN NAGENGAST, a 38-year veteran of the NSA, told Turton.

Biden’s economic challenge: finding workers and goods (AP’s Josh Boak)

America’s Covid rules are a dumpster fire (The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Wu)

Why some Democrats are upset about Biden-Harris visit to Georgia (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Patricia Murphy, Greg Bluestein and Tia Mitchell)

Supreme Court seems skeptical of Biden’s vaccine rules for businesses (WaPo’s Robert Barnes & Anne E. Marimow)

He delivered remarks regarding the December jobs report at the White House this morning. He then departed for Colorado, where he will meet with families affected by the Marshall Fire and briefly deliver remarks.

He leaves Colorado this evening, and is scheduled to arrive in Las Vegas, Nev. around 10:30 p.m.

No public events scheduled.

Harris adviser LORRAINE VOLES used to work at George Washington University, and once provided the university newspaper, The GW Hatchet, with some stark advice for parents visiting their kids in college over parents weekend.

“Don’t expect that your kids will be 100 percent happy,” she said. “This may be the first opportunity they have to admit to being a little homesick, or that they are struggling with the workload or that they are not getting along with a roommate.”

Voles suggested visiting parents “listen, be positive and do not try to solve every problem for them. What's more: Don’t scrub their bathrooms. Don’t even go in their bathroom.”

That seems like good advice for parents of teenagers everywhere.

MEA CULPA — In Thursday’s edition, we included DESTINE HICKS’ old post, rather than her new one. She is currently the deputy White House liaison at the EPA.

CHESTER ARTHUR, who managed to keep his condition hidden from the public after he became president following the death of JAMES GARFIELD in July 1881. The disease would lead to Arthur’s reluctance to campaign for another term, subsequent failure to win re-nomination, and his death just two years after leaving the presidency.

Join the Miller Center and presidential experts live online, on Jan. 13 to discuss President Biden’s first year. Register here.

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Edited by Emily Cadei

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