President Joe Biden appears to be skimping on his self-proclaimed promise to have lunch with Vice President Kamala Harris “alone once a week.”
Biden made the public promise during an interview with People Magazine shortly after taking office. The president emphasized the importance of giving Harris access, pointing out that he was afforded those opportunities as vice president under former President Barack Obama.
“[Like] Barack and I, we have lunch alone once a week,” Biden said at the time. “That’s the deal when we’re [Harris and Biden] both in country, which we’ll be for a while because of COVID, and I see her all the time.”
To date, however, Biden-Harris lunches in the White House’s Private Dining Room remain scarce. According to a review of the president’s public schedule, the two have privately dined together just 25 times since Biden took office.
Democratic U.S. vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris speaks during a “Build Back Better” roundtable with Black Milwaukee business owners to discuss how a Biden-Harris administration would advance racial equity as part of our nation’s economic recovery, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. September 7, 2020. REUTERS/Alex Wroblewski
Twenty-three of the lunches came in 2021, according to the president’s public schedule.
In 2022, Biden and Harris have only eaten together twice, Real Clear Politics first reported. RCP noted that this marked “a significant drop” for the same time period in 2021, where Biden and Harris ate lunch together 12 times.
One of this year’s private lunches occurred shortly after Biden returned from Poland. The second happened amid Biden’s Supreme Court nominee search, RCP reported.
Multiple reports suggest Biden’s relationship with Harris has not always been easy. The New York Times’ Jonathan Marin and Alex Burns, for one, report in their upcoming book that Biden and Harris’s “weekly lunches lacked a real depth of personal and political intimacy.” (RELATED: REPORT: WH ‘Privately Mocked’ Kamala Harris Aides Who Complained Immigration Was Too Hard For Her To Handle)
Questions surrounding how often Biden and Harris work directly together coincide with Harris testing positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday. Aides said at the time that Harris hadn’t seen Biden for eight days, The New York Times reported.
Still, the White House maintains that the two “are in constant touch with each other,” Deputy Press Secretary Chris Meagher told RCP.
“And he relies on her counsel, partnership, and friendship as they work together to continue to grow the economy, cut costs for working families, rally the world in the face of Russia’s aggression, and make historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure,” Meagher said.