While Biden was president, his failing mental acuity was apparently kept from, not only the press, but even his cabinet members. That means that "aides" were, in fact, making policy and running the government to a fair degree.

Not for nuthin’, but that is always true. The President sets the overall agenda, and aides carry out most of the dirty work: rounding up votes, writing (or help writing) legislation, deflecting people with requests, reaching out to lobbyists for support and all the rest.) There is simply far too much going on for one person to be “in charge” of it all, except in a “vision” role. Now add up all the wasted time in performance-of-the-job activities (dinners, greeting and photo-ops with donors, glad handing the little people and so on, and there’s really precious little time for the real in-the-trenches work of getting things done.

That doesn’t mean that Biden was fully on-the-job, I’m not making apologies, and the staff (particularly Chief of Staff) is probably more in charge of getting what’s important in front of the president, and thereby has a larger hand in getting things accomplished than the President himself.

Supposedly they reduced Biden’s hours to “more daylight”, less “later in the day”, which, if the Chief of Staff was competent, meant that the most important stuff still passed his desk while the chaff was shuffled off to underlings.

I’m still agog that they were able to hide his decline for so long, particularly with the kind of scrutiny that happens these days as compared with, say, Wilson’s stroke and his wife’s protective enclosure around him for such a long time.